


cut to the feeling

by cherryconke



Series: cut to the feeling [2]
Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Olympics, Fake/Pretend Relationship, Family Dynamics, Fluff, Gymnast Felix, Humor, M/M, Paparazzi/Press, Social drinking, Swimmer Sylvain
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-28
Updated: 2020-08-28
Packaged: 2021-03-06 21:06:45
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 33,702
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26165362
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cherryconke/pseuds/cherryconke
Summary: Love in Tokyo: French Athletes Turn Up the Heat!French gymnast Felix Fraldarius was caught sneaking into the swim team’s locker rooms after Sunday night’s qualifying events ended. It turns out Fraldarius, 23, wasn’t switching sports, but visiting his boyfriend, Sylvain Gautier! Gautier, 25, also of France, qualified for the men’s 100-metre butterfly event earlier that night. The two lovebirds spent some quality time alone after Gautier placed second with a qualifying time of 51.62 — check out the photo gallery below!Sylvain Gautier came to the Olympics to win a gold medal. Instead, he gets a (fake) boyfriend.
Relationships: Dimitri Alexandre Blaiddyd/Glenn Fraldarius, Felix Hugo Fraldarius/Sylvain Jose Gautier
Series: cut to the feeling [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1983256
Comments: 66
Kudos: 532
Collections: Sylvix Big Bang





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Happy Sylvix Big Bang! [@eggyankee](https://twitter.com/eggyankee) and I worked together to bring you something silly and sweet and a liiiiiittle bit sporty – fake dating at the Summer Olympics. Go check out the additional pieces she did [here](https://twitter.com/eggyankee/status/1299488899333591040) and [here](https://twitter.com/cherryconke/status/1299490214461673472)! I truly feel like I hit the jackpot with my BB pairing! ❤️
> 
> HUGE thank you to [devin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/imalright/pseuds/imalright), [ning](https://archiveofourown.org/users/euphemea/pseuds/euphemea), and [eth](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ethereally/pseuds/Ethereally), who all read through this fic at various stages of the process and helped me push it forward. ily all!!!
> 
> There's an accompanying [Spotify playlist](https://open.spotify.com/user/1242297211/playlist/4VATIyKRKSfmVXIQ0U8h56?si=4Gb4Hn9DRAKqFhxkfhZLIw) for this fic! It ranges from French electropop to Frank Sinatra and includes all of the gang's karaoke picks from the fic!
> 
> A few more things to note:
> 
> — At it's core, this is a lighthearted fic, but please mind these content warnings: social partying/alcohol consumption, minor reference to past sibling abuse, reference to past sports-related injury.  
> — I took a few liberties with lacrosse – it's not currently included in the summer Olympics lineup, but it's been part of the games five times before, twice as an official sport and three times as a demonstration sport!  
> — No knowledge of professional lacrosse, swimming, gymnastics, or sports in general needed!

_In between the lines  
Is the only place you’ll find  
What you’re missing  
That you didn’t know was there  
—_

Sylvain Gautier is jetlagged and ready to party.

He tweets as much when the plane finally touches down at Haneda to his twenty-two thousand and sixty-nine Twitter followers (nice),a cheery _just landed! next stop: oly village_ – complete with a tongue-out, grinning selfie taken from his plush first-class seat. Likes and comments trickle in as he waits for his luggage at the carousel, scrolling through the growing list of notifications with bored disinterest as he stretches his calves out against the curb. His flight had been nonstop – thank _fuck_ – but twelve hours with barely enough leg room from Paris to Tokyo is more than enough to do anyone in.

It’s good to be back. He’s missed the vibrant adrenaline; the trains, like arteries, rushing through the heart of the city; the perfect symmetry where brick meets buildings in sharp angles and clean lines of forward progression and celadon skies. Even if he’s jetlagged to hell and back, the promise of adventure – of getting lost in the obscurity amidst thirty-million other strangers, of competing in the motherfucking _Olympics_ – is just enough to keep him alert and awake as he waits for his pre-scheduled town car under the _arrivals_ sign, searching for _Gautier, S._ in the surging sea of people and luggage.

The trip along the outskirts of the city is quick, his driver quiet and efficient as he navigates the expressway that winds through streams of skyscrapers, a low cloud of fog rolling away to tease at a hot summer day. Sylvain alternates between scrolling and staring out the window, trying not to let his eyes slide shut in the calming, rhythmic motions of the car. It’s two-am back home, and if it wasn’t for the months of diligent training Byleth had forced him through (Sylvain’s never had a strict bedtime in his _life,_ and twenty-five is one hell of a year to start), he’d probably be downing a sugary airport frappuccino to help stay awake. 

They pass the toll bridge and stop at security – the driver flashes his badge and Sylvain pulls his passport and paperwork from his bag, the official invitation pressed neatly into creamy cardstock, stamped, signed, and official. A rainbow of flags, each bearing five interlocking rings, decorates the archway, greeting them in a dizzying paragraph of different languages: 

_Welcome to Tokyo!_

_東京へようこそ_

_Bienvenue à Tokyo!_

Sylvain hadn’t been sure what to expect when his fingertips had hit the touchpad at the end of the pool in Rennes last year, glowing red declaring 2:10.12, a fraction of a second under qualifying time. Whatever it was, it certainly wasn’t this: a small collection of skyscrapers, surrounded on three sides by the grey-blue Tokyo Harbor and the sprawling skyline. There’s a park at the end of it, leafy green and neatly maintained, boardwalks running along the water and sleek sets of café tables and chairs dotting the grass. Everything is shiny and new, all glass and arching steel beams. 

Athlete’s Village.

It defies Sylvain’s expectation of _village_ in all sense of the word; there aren’t any quaint wooden cabins or dirt trails in sight. Thank fuck, because he’s fairly certain he wouldn’t survive long outside the distractions and anonymity of a major city. 

The minute he steps out of the car it’s a whirl of frenetic energy and a jumble of languages, _Japanese-French-Mandarin-English-Russian,_ too quick-tongued for Sylvain to pick up, fragments of dialects from across the globe all mixing together. The rest of the town car queue circles in steady waves, and his driver disappears back into the mass of sleek cars, undoubtedly on his way back to the airport for the next slew of arrivals. Hundreds of flags fly high and proud in the breeze, snapping against their flagpoles over Sylvain’s head as he slings his duffles across his back and steps inside.

The lobby is bubbling over with energy: clusters of athletes and trainers milling about, huddled in groups around racks of luggage and equipment; volunteers and officials in polos emblazoned with those same perfect circles directing people into the correct queues, handing out maps and schedules folded up into handy packets of pamphlets. Sylvain smiles at the woman who points him towards the line he belongs in: _Last name: Fa–Ge._

He sets his duffles down on the floor and pulls out his phone, settling in for a long wait as the line moves steadily forward.

“I can’t believe they offered _you two_ first-class.”

Sylvain’s ears perk up, both at the French and the rough, borderline-bratty timbre. He looks up from his phone, where he’s scrolling aimlessly through the scattered handful of replies on his previous tweet (all to the tune of _good luck, sylvie! –_ an unfortunate nickname that’s cropped up everywhere since he found himself in the spotlight again) to the group in front of him: three men, two slender and dark-haired, the other blonde and built, quite frankly, like a brick house. 

The blonde guy frowns. “I believe they simply offer upgrades at random, Felix.”

The man he’s talking to – Sylvain assumes he’s Felix – huffs, crossing his arms over his chest. The other doesn’t respond – he’s too busy watching the arrival queue through the floor-length windows looking vaguely bored. Upon looking closer, Sylvain recognizes him as the long, sleek ponytail from seat 2A. He distinctly remembers waiting for the washroom up front and feeling a pang of jealousy at how comfortable he’d looked, curled snug against his boyfriend’s chest while Sylvain clutched at the tiny free blanket they’d given him in an effort to keep his limbs from freezing off while he wistfully wished for his own human pillow.

Then Sylvain turns his gaze to the third man.

Skintight leggings highlight slim, muscular legs and an ass to die for. A black half-zip sweatshirt, emblazoned with a scattering of sponsor logos and _F. Fraldarius,_ is unzipped to expose the pale line of his throat. Messy bangs and a sloppy bun frame delicate features: sharp eyes fringed with dark lashes, the sloping shape of his nose, his mouth twisted into a pout, or maybe it’s a sneer.

And holy _shit,_ he’s hot.

“First class is classist bullshit, anyway. Annette texted me and her and Ingrid both got upgraded too,” he mutters, and warm amusement settles between Sylvain’s lungs, the heady rush of physical attraction blooming hot in his chest.

“That much salt can’t be good for your bloodstream, Fe,” seat 2A deadpans through a smirk.

They have to be brothers, or at least related. There are too many similarities. The slight builds and matching shades of hair are obvious giveaways, but so are the high cheekbones and pink, pinched mouths. There are slight differences, though – namely, one pair of eyes is a warm amber-honey, while the other is a shimmering grey-blue. Felix scowls at 2A, but it lacks any real animosity.

The line moves forward in a shuffle of duffels and suitcases. Somewhere in the mix, one of theirs is left behind. Sylvain spots it as the perfect opportunity to try and make friends.

“Forget something?”

He smiles, the forgotten duffel offered out in one hand. It sports a screenprint of the French flag, an embroidered patch featuring two crossed lacrosse sticks, and _Blaiddyd_ embroidered in gold thread across the side.

Blondie perks up, turning back towards him. His smile is earnest and wide. “Oh! My apologies. Thank you.”

“Don’t mention it.” Once the luggage is safely stacked on top of his large rolling suitcase, Sylvain extends a hand. “Sylvain Gautier, nice to meet you. I think we were on the same flight.”

“Dimitri Blaiddyd.” Dimitri clears his throat and looks over, but the two brothers are engrossed in what looks like a snippy argument, completely oblivious to Sylvain or Dimitri. His smile turns sheepish. “Sorry about them. Did you fly in from Paris?”

Sylvain nods. He’s about to elaborate and jump into the typical spiel – _twenty-five, born in La Rochelle, but Paris has been home for the last ten years_ – when the line shuffles forward again, bringing them up to the very front. The shorter brother looks at Sylvain with a lazy, bored stare as he readjusts and leans up against Dimitri’s side, dwarfed by at least twenty centimeters. Dimitri’s smile grows impossibly bright, one hand coming up to smooth circles into the shoulder of the shorter man’s jacket, fond affection practically radiating off of him.

“This is my trainer, Glenn. Sylvain’s from Paris too, he came in on the same flight as ours.”

_Trainer, huh?_ Sylvain would eat his entire shoe if there isn’t anything more than a trainer-athlete relationship there, but he masks his disbelief with a friendly smile. It’s not unheard of for personal trainers to accompany their athletes to the games, but only a rare few can ever actually afford to. “Nice to meet you.”

A loud, obvious huff interrupts them. “Dimitri. Are you coming or what? We’re up.”

Felix taps his toe with his arms crossed, scowling at the three of them, the very picture of annoyed impatience. Sylvain’s heart rate picks up, but he can’t really put his finger on why. He looks like (and this might be the understatement of the year) a real piece of work: all tightly-wired nerves and barely contained energy, tension radiating from him in palpable waves. Sylvain can hear him muttering something about _you’re always making us late, almost made us miss our flight_ as he hoists a duffel bag over his shoulder. 

Sylvain had expected to meet attractive people here. He’s heard stories from Rio and Pyeongchang, how condoms are handed out by the fistful and hookups happen around every corner. Felix, though – Felix looks like he was plucked from Sylvain’s wettest dreams. It punches the breath out of him.

Dimitri smiles at him before he starts to follow the two brothers, warm and friendly where Felix is not. “I’m sure we’ll see you around. I’ve heard they’re grouping floors by home country.”

Sylvain waves goodbye as they’re directed to the next available receptionist. When it’s his turn, he slips on his most charming smile, passport and paperwork in hand.

“Sylvain Gautier, Team France.”

_I wanna cut through the clouds, break the ceiling_  
I wanna dance on the roof, you and me alone  
— 

The high-rise, Sylvain soon discovers, is laid out like the new, looming towers of apartments on the outskirts of Paris: each floor comprised of long hallways, common areas, reading nooks, kitchens stocked with fresh-pressed juice and baskets full of those atrocious energy cubes. The surrounding complex features an indoor onsen, a full-service spa, and – perhaps most importantly – a massive, world-class gym. There’s even a solarium on the twentieth floor, the receptionist tells him, handing over his keycard and neatly printed map.

(He flirts back with empty smiles and halfhearted lines, too busy watching Dimitri, Felix, and Glenn haul their luggage over towards the elevators to notice her scribbling down her phone number on the back of his campus map.)

A giant French flag greets him upon reaching the eighteenth floor, a gaudy splash of red among soothing navy and light bamboo. The hallway is bustling, filled with _bonjours_ and raucous laughter as teammates find and greet each other through open doors. Maybe if he had more energy, he’d stop by, say hello, make friends, maybe see if there’s anything fun happening later tonight – but Sylvain focuses his energy on finding his room first, the heavy weight of jetlag catching up to him all at once.

The key-reader flashes green halfway down the hall. Sylvain lets himself in, drops his bags, and promptly passes out face-first on the bed.

When he comes to, the sun has set over Tokyo and his mouth tastes like ass. He hadn’t bothered to close the blinds before falling asleep, but the view from the floor-length windows is stunning: cotton-candy pink and blue bleed together and reflect off the still water of the harbor, bathing everything in a tangerine glow. He blinks, wiping the sleep from his eyes and a stain of drool from the corner of his mouth. _First order of business: find toothbrush._

Sylvain’s halfway through unpacking his second duffel when he sees it: a small, bright yellow flyer slipped beneath his door, the corners fluttering in the air-conditioned breeze. He retrieves it from the floor, turning it over in his palms.

_Welcome party TONIGHT! Rooftop @ 9PM_

Sylvain snorts at the handwritten note scribbled below the typed text: 

_NOT officially sanctioned by the Olympic Committee!!!_

He debates the pros and cons of going as he finishes unpacking and showers the gross sleep-sweat and distinct airplane-smell from his hair. His _original_ plan – before his impromptu nap – had been to spend tonight exploring Tokyo, to get lost and gorge himself on street food, maybe find a bar or three, spend the rest of the night between a stranger’s sheets. Claude and Ferdinand don’t fly in until tomorrow morning, so he’s left to his own devices tonight – and the playground of a massive city where nobody knows his name makes him feel like the possibilities are endless.

But, it’d probably be good to make some friends. And there’s no harm in stopping by, checking it out, seeing what the fuss is about. He’ll pop up for a drink or two, get a little buzz going before exploring the city. He can always leave early if it’s lame. It’s a decent plan, he thinks, pulling on a white t-shirt, the best pair of jeans he brought, and high-tops. 

—

When Sylvain reaches the rooftop – properly late, half-past ten – it is _decidedly_ not lame. 

There’s so many people it feels like the entire buildinggot the little half-sheet memo and decided to show up. People are clustered around bar tables and stools, lounging on low sofas, swaying on the fringe of a dancefloor towards the center of the roof. Neat rows of warm café lights illuminate everyone in a rosy glow, and the music is loud, a heady blend of deep bass and upbeat bubblegum pop layered together. It’s not late enough that people have started to dance, but Sylvain recognizes it well: the party teeters on the precipice of a _party-_ party, easily swayed into devolving into the throes of drunken chaos with a round or two of tequila shots.

Sylvain’s been to plenty of parties for the Parisian elite, but he doesn’t think there’s ever been _this_ many good-looking people in one place at one time. It’s a little unreal. Everywhere he looks there’s another set of perfectly defined biceps, another pair of otherworldly legs, another immaculately sculpted ass. 

As he weaves through the crowd, he realizes that he’s overdressed – everyone, as far as he can tell, is in tight spandex and lycra, never straying too far from typical pro-athlete loungewear: tees and tanktops with sponsorship logos splashed across the back, brand-name leggings and the most expensive footwear money can buy. Thankfully, it’s dark enough that he doesn’t think he’ll be singled out, but there’s still that childish twist of needing _belonging_ and _acceptance_ that flutters in his stomach like the worst kind of nerves.

So Sylvain does what he always does when things are a little overwhelming and too-much at parties: he fixes a plasticky smile on his face and heads to the bar. It’s always better to have something in hand while he mingles, whether it’s shitty beer or just seltzer-and-lime passing as gin. When his glass is full it’s something for his hands to do; when it’s empty, it serves as a convenient excuse to leave a boring conversation.

He’s just turning away from the bar, ginger beer mixing with lime fizzing at the brim of his flimsy plastic cup, when a deep, cheerful voice interrupts him from planning his next move.

“Hey! Sylvain, right?” Blondie – Dimitri – smiles at him, clapping one broad hand on his shoulder. He really is like a golden retriever, Sylvain thinks, eager and earnest, his shaggy hair pulled back in a half-ponytail. 

Sylvain grins back. “Get some good rest? I passed out the minute I got to my room.”

Dimitri nods and sips his drink. It looks suspiciously like orange juice. “Yes, we all took naps. The jetlag is quite terrible.”

He’s alone, much to Sylvain’s dismay – there’s no sight of long, dark hair anywhere, no lithe, wiry frame or scathing huffs to fill the air. “Isn’t it? Did you come up alone?”

“Oh, no.” Dimitri laughs. He sounds almost nervous. “Glenn is just over here–”

Dimitri motions him to follow, and they weave through the crowd back to a corner tucked away from the flickering lights and music. Glenn’s seated alone at a cluster of low lounge chairs, drinking what looks like water and zoning out with that thousand-yard stare at nothing in particular. He looks bored, but then again, Sylvain thinks he might just have the kind of face that _always_ looks bored. 

Sylvain waves hello. Glenn tips his head in the slightest nod back, rising to his feet to fit himself into the curve of Dimitri’s waist. 

“So, what are you competing in anyway?” Sylvain asks. Years of mixing and mingling and a certain amount of natural charisma have always served him well at parties, and this one is no exception. “I didn’t get the chance to ask earlier.”

“I’m on the lacrosse team. Felix is a gymnast.” 

Sylvain swears every coherent thought leaves his mind except for: _Oh. Bendy._

He’s scrambling for an appropriate response when Dimitri smiles over his shoulder. “Oh, hello Felix! We were just talking about you!”

Felix’s hair is tied up in a sloppy bun at the crown of his head, the loose ends catching in the warmth of the string lights. He’s traded his track jacket for a plain black t-shirt and joggers that ride low on his hips – Sylvain can see the little sliver of skin peeking out, can practically feel the toned muscle beneath the cotton, clinging to his stomach in the summer heat. 

He looks devastatingly hot and _extremely_ bored. _Maybe resting bitch face just runs in the family._

“Were you?” Felix asks. The song transitions, bass rattling the floor, adrenaline pumping through Sylvain’s heels. He turns to Sylvain with a hint of a smile – and if Sylvain thought that _he_ was checking Felix out, well, the look Felix gives him is downright predatory: eyes hungry and sharp, sweeping all the way from his feet to disheveled hair. Sylvain suppresses a shiver, but he doesn’t look away.

Dimitri nods. “Yes, we were talking about our events. I was just telling Sylvain that you’re a gymnast.”

“Bars and vault.” Felix sips his drink, his perfect pout folding delicately around the straw in his cup. Sylvain struggles not to drool. Amber eyes flick back over to Sylvain, flitting over the width of his shoulders, the narrowed taper of his waist. “And let me guess... You swim?”

_Damn._ _Spot on._ Sylvain doesn’t let his smile slip, though – he just grins brightly back at Felix. “Butterfly and freestyle, but mostly ’fly. I’ve never watched gymnastics before.” 

This, finally, makes Felix smile with a hint of teeth, just this side of dangerous. Glenn interrupts their obvious eye-fucking with a yawn, stifling it with the back of his hand. “I’m going back to the room.”

Felix rolls his eyes. “You just woke up from a six hour nap.”

Glenn shrugs, evidently used to his brother’s sharp tongue. “I need to get on a normal sleep schedule, Fe. You should do the same.” He pauses, slipping his empty plastic cup to nest beneath Dimitri’s. “Dima, you coming?”

Dimitri nods, cordial as ever. “Goodnight, Felix. Sylvain, I hope I’ll see you around.”

“You too.” Felix scoffs, and Sylvain waves, their backs disappearing into the swell of the crowd. 

And just like that, he’s alone with Felix. He shifts to lean against the railing separating roof from sky, and the brush of his arm against Sylvain’s own is enough to shoot electricity through each of his nerve endings. Sylvain follows suit, turning his gaze out towards the city. The view is stunning: skyscrapers painted in black and indigo, glowing lights blurred to smudges of vivid phosphorescence, dazzling and infinitely vast. His eyes flicker back to Felix before long, equally enchanted by the slight part of his lips, the faint circles carved beneath his eyes.

Sylvain wants to say something witty, or charming, or witty _and_ charming, but he finds himself drawing a blank, searching for something – anything – to say. Unfortunately, all he comes up with is:

“So, how long have they been dating?”

Felix scoffs. Evidently, this was the wrong thing to ask. “They’re not dating. Dimitri’s a longtime family friend. We all grew up together.”

_Not dating, my ass,_ Sylvain wants to say, but something in the hard set of Felix’s jaw redirects him to bite his tongue instead. “Oh, cool.” He cringes at how very _uncool_ he sounds. _Okay, Gautier, get it together._

“Do you want another drink?” Sylvain tries instead. 

Felix promptly downs the rest of what’s in his cup and passes it to him without looking away from the view. “Sure. Seltzer water with lemon.”

The entire time Sylvain’s at the bar, he hopes that Felix hasn’t used this excuse to ditch him – though he’d be a little surprised if he did. He’s well-acquainted with the chase, the high that comes with playing hard to get and the sweet payoff at the end. And he knows the look Felix gave him earlier intimately: an invitation to flirt, a not-so-subtle _game on._

Felix is still leaning against the railing when he gets back, flaunting that perfect ass again. Sylvain hands over the cup, letting his fingers linger as they brush against his. He’d spent his trip to the bar and back thinking of potential conversation topics, so he feels pretty smug when he nods over towards the dance floor. “Wanna dance?”

Felix laughs, sharp and sarcastic, and Sylvain is absolutely gut-punched by the sound. “I don’t dance.”

“What, you’re a gymnast and you’re telling me you don’t dance? I bet you’d blow all of them out of the water.” Maybe he’s laying it on a little thick, because Felix just snorts, shaking his head before looking back out to the view. 

Alright. No dancing. That’s fine – it was a shoddy excuse to get closer to Felix, anyway. And, because he’s nothing if not stubborn, he tries again. 

“Have you ever been to Tokyo before?”

This makes Felix pause. He turns to look up at Sylvain, dim light filtering through dark, thick lashes. “No. First time. Have you?”

“Yeah. Only on business trips, though.” He distinctly remembers endless hours spent on the family’s private jet, traveling to Tokyo and Shanghai and Melbourne, him and Miklan expected to sit quietly and behavewhile his father dragged them along for business trips that lasted weeks while he tried to wine-and-dine-clients, making back-room deals. Getting left at the sprawling, private estates and penthouses they rented grew worse with each year that went by as Miklan’s frustrated outbursts grew increasingly violent, and Sylvain’s bitter resentment at their lack of freedom continued to swell.

Felix snorts again, but this time he looks mildly surprised. “Businessman _and_ pro athlete, huh?”

“Family business,” Sylvain corrects, and god, if there isn’t anything sexier than someone not recognizing him _or_ his family name. He’s made his fair share of appearances in _Le Parisien,_ headlines like _Fall From Grace: Gautier Heir On 4 Day Bender (Again!) pg. 22,_ accompanied with unflattering, washed-out photos of him stepping out of clubs hungover to hell and back, or sunburnt on the beach, always accompanied by his rotating cast of arm candy. 

“Turns out swimming is much more my thing,” he explains when Felix raises an eyebrow at him. “But I could show you around, if you wanted.”

Felix snorts again. He really has no right to look hot while he does that. “I don’t have time for distractions.”

So that’s what it is. Sylvain’s felt the competitive thrum in the air ever since he stepped out of his town car, but Felix practically radiates it. And he’d heard Byleth’s lectures to the team before they left – _you’re there to win and represent France, don’t get distracted_ – but he really only has two or three days of actual competition sprinkled throughout the month, and the same is probably true for Felix. What better way to fill the days between quarter-finals and semifinals than with a handful of hookups with some of the most athletic people in the world?

“There’s _distractions,_ and there’s blowing off steam.” Sylvain sips his drink under the pretense of shifting the slightest bit closer to Felix. “They aren’t mutually exclusive.”

The smirk on Felix’s face sends all the blood in his brain rushing south. When Felix speaks, it’s low and rough, sparking shivers down Sylvain’s spine. “What’s your angle?”

He’s close enough to see the starlight reflecting in Felix’s eyes, to count every fluttering lash framing them. Sylvain thinks he looks awfully pretty like this, that devious smirk twisted sharp beneath the distant moon. His ears feel fuzzy, like they’re stuffed full of cotton. “What do you mean?”

(They both know _exactly_ what he means.)

“I thought you’d fuck off when I told you I don’t dance.”

Sylvain grins. The buzzing in his brain intensifies as he leans in closer. “That’s not a dealbreaker for me.”

He feels more than hears Felix’s half-silent chuckle, breath ghosting across his face in a smooth exhale. They’re so close (when did they get so close?) and Felix is looking at him with that expression again, the one that says _you want to kiss me, don’t you?,_ and Sylvain thinks that maybe he should just take a leap and close the gap between them, when–

Somebody brushes by them, squeezing between the back of their legs and the low chaise with a mumbled _excuse me._ It pushes him up against Felix, static electricity where their arms touch. From here, Sylvain belatedly realizes how little he is – almost a full head shorter than him, all wiry muscle but still slender.

“Sorry– is this okay?” Sylvain can feel heat pooling in his cheeks. If he weren’t so enamoured with the way Felix is smirking up at him, eyes half-lidded and coy, he’d almost be annoyed – he doesn’t _get_ flushed like this.

“I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t.” Felix leans in, and Sylvain thinks that they’re finally, _finally_ going to get this show on the road, but before their lips can touch he’s pulling away, evidently amused at how Sylvain’s smile falls. “I should sleep, though. I have the early training slot at the gym.”

The warmth of Felix’s arm pressed against his is slow to leave when he steps away. Sylvain scrambles to steady himself, feeling thoroughly untethered. 

“Right. Maybe we could meet up after. I could show you around.” He definitely has training of his own tomorrow, along with a full day of interviews and appearances Dorothea lined up for him. But it’s only _one day,_ and it’d be impossible to get murdered by your PR person for playing hooky when they’re all the way back in France, right? (Knowing Dorothea, Sylvain wouldn’t put it past her.)

Felix looks thoughtful, like he’s actually considering it. “Maybe. Or maybe I’ll see you at the opening ceremony.”

Sylvain grins. _Perfect._ “It’s a date.”

“No, it’s a maybe,” Felix corrects. Sylvain could swear he looks just a touch flustered when he turns, gives a curt little wave, and disappears into the crowd.


	2. Chapter 2

_I love making you believe  
What you get is what you see  
But I’m so fake happy  
I feel so fake happy_  
—

Talks in Tokyo: An Interview with Swimmer Sylvain Gautier  
As part of our ongoing series of Olympic athlete profiles, Hilda Valentine sat down with Sylvain Gautier of France to talk how he got here, a day in the life of a professional athlete, and posing for Playboy.

**Hilda Valentine:** So, your first Olympics! Welcome to Tokyo. How are you feeling?

**Sylvain Gautier:** Thanks! I’m feeling pretty good.

**Hilda Valentine:** What inspired you to get here? 

**Sylvain Gautier:** Well, I’ve been swimming since I was little. It’s something that’s always made sense to me, even when everything else doesn’t. _Especially_ when everything else doesn’t. Does that even make sense? _[laughs]_ Sorry, I’m still pretty jetlagged.

**Hilda Valentine:** Yeah, totally!

**Sylvain Gautier:** I wasn’t recruited out of high school because I wasn’t serious enough about it at the time. I wasn’t serious about much of anything, if I’m being completely honest. _[laughs]_ So I think part of it too, is like, wanting to pull myself together and accomplish something for me – not because someone else wanted me to.

**Hilda Valentine:** You’ve starred in your fair share of headlines before – will you speak to those?

**Sylvain Gautier:** I’m not sure there’s much to say – _[laughs]_ really, though, I think most people go through a phase like that when they’re growing up. Swimming helped me move away from that part of my life.

**Hilda Valentine:** So what are you hoping to see going into the prelims?

**Sylvain Gautier:** I’m hoping to make it through both the 100 and 200 [metre] fly events. The freestyle medleys would be awesome, too, but right now I’m really focused on nailing my times on those two. Our team is up for the relays, too – it’d be incredible to take a medal home with the boys. It’s my first Olympics, so right now I’m trying to soak it in and experience Tokyo as much as I can between training.

**Hilda Valentine:** Speaking of the team – you and Ferdinand von Aegir are both competing for gold in the 100 metre butterfly event. What’s it like going head-to-head with a gold medalist?

**Sylvain Gautier:** We definitely don’t go easy on each other. There’s a lot of friendly competition on our team, more so with Ferdie, since we both swim butterfly. Training with him definitely makes me a better athlete – that guy is _dedicated._

**Hilda Valentine:** You’ve both experienced quite a surge in popularity since qualifiers in Rennes last spring. What’s been the best part of this newfound fame?

**Sylvain Gautier:** There’s a lot of perks, but the coolest was probably posing for Playboy [France]. The set was totally wild. I’ve never modeled before, but everyone was very sweet and patient with me. The lingerie was amazing, too. 

**Hilda Valentine:** Well, unfortunately, I think we’re almost at time. I do have one last question, though: what does a day in the life of Sylvain Gautier look like?

**Sylvain Gautier:** Wake up. Eat breakfast, usually eggs and toast. I’ll weight train for a few hours at the gym every other day with my coach. Then lunch and swim practice for two or three hours before I eat dinner and go to bed. On my days off, I like to read, hang out with friends, go to museums, eat out. Normal stuff like that. Rinse and repeat.

\---

More from Hilda Valentine with Buzzfeed Sports: 

Ferdinand von Aegir Wins Hearts and Shoots For Gold | _At 23 years old, he’s France’s best bet for taking home a medal, AND he’s super cute!_

Olympic Booty Appreciation Post | _Toned butts, tiny butts – this is what the Olympics are all about._

Heartbreak in Manchester: The Worst Injury of the 2018 World Lacrosse Championship | _French lacrosse player Glenn Fraldarius was leading his team to victory in the semifinals when disaster struck. (WARNING: graphic images and video)._

_You’re stuck in my head, stuck on my heart, stuck on my body  
I wanna go, get out of here, I’m sick of the party  
I’d run away, I’d run away with you_  
—

“Hey.” Sylvain smiles and pulls out the empty stool next to Felix. 

It isn’t the smoothest opener, but his brain is fried from the blur of makeup, mic checks, and the monotony of nonstop press appearances that had taken up the majority of his day. Not to mention the opening ceremony earlier that night (which took _way_ longer than he ever remembered it being on TV). Four-and-a-half hours of walking, waiting, and watching left him feeling jittery and bored, unable to spot Felix or Dimitri in the sea of teal, navy, and red track jackets during the Parade of Nations. 

Each of the countries shuffled their athletes off to various afterparties around the city after the ceremony had ended in a teeth-rattling fireworks display and a flock of digital doves flying across the dizzying array of screens lining the perimeter of the stadium. The French committee had rented out a swanky tapas bar, all clean lines and minimal decor, the lighting turned down low and warm, the plates impossibly dainty but endless: fresh snow crab and snapper, marbled Wagyu and blackthroat seaperch, pike eel with red plum paste.

Felix grunts back a half-hearted hello and sips his water. 

“You look bored,” Sylvain says, watching him scroll through his phone. Felix had barely bothered to look up at his greeting, seemingly oblivious to the ongoing chatter around him. Sylvain glances up to the bar – there’s a cluster of people there, and a chorus of _santé!_ rings bright among tipsy laughter. It feels a little off, not being the one up there ordering another round of shots, not being the center of attention. 

Felix doesn’t look up from his phone. “And _you_ have impeccable observation skills.”

This punches a laugh out of him and he’s pleased to see the ghost of a smile, faint on Felix’s lips, when he looks up and shoves his phone into the pocket of his track jacket.

Inspiration strikes him, a grin unfurling across his face. “Wanna get out of here?”

Felix frowns, raising a dubious eyebrow. Sylvain backtracks. “Hey, I didn’t mean it like that. Would you wanna go for a walk? I could use some fresh air.”

Sylvain remains hopeful, even through the little huff Felix gives, rolling his eyes. “Fine.”

—

“So, where are you taking me?”

The air outside is humid and the breeze that ruffles Felix’s ponytail across his shoulders is warm, smelling like fresh gingko and takoyaki smoke from the vendors that line the alleyways and sidewalks. They’ve both taken off their official Olympics-embroidered jackets, leaving Felix in a fitted tank top and these skimpy little running shorts that do absolute wonders for his legs (and don’t leave much to the imagination).

Sylvain hums. “Well, is there anything _you_ want to see?”

Butterflies bloom in his chest at the sound of Felix scoffing. “I thought you were the one showing me around.”

He can’t help but chuckle. “Yeah, I guess I am. Are you hungry at all?”

The answer, realistically, should be _no_ – their dinner earlier had been unlimited – but Sylvain distinctly remembers the way Felix left last night with the promise of early-morning training on his lips. Sylvain’s no gymnast, but he figures it must be pretty similar – that is, the borderline scary amount of food he needs to consume to swim three hours a day and keep his endless metabolism fed. 

“A little,” Felix says. 

Sylvain thinks as they walk, weighing his options carefully. This isn’t a date, as Felix so eloquently pointed out last night, so anything remotely date-like or sit-down is definitely out. It’s also late – nearing midnight, according to the digital display of his fitness watch – which automatically removes most restaurants they pass by, their windows dark and curtains drawn.

He remembers the handful of trips his father brought him on as a teenager – spending entire days essentially locked up in various expensive high-rises throughout the city, under strict instructions to _not get in any trouble,_ and nights spent sneaking out to roam free, the sleepless glow of a new city at night too enticing to sit back and experience from penthouse windows.

“Do you like street food? Skewers, that kind of thing?” Sylvain turns to Felix. His grin is uncharacteristically wide when he looks back at him.

“Fuck yeah.”

—

“I’ve never been to a gymnastics…” Sylvain trails off thoughtfully. _Tournament? Meet? Event?_

Thankfully, Felix fills in for him, looking amused as he tears a piece of spiced chicken off a wooden skewer with his teeth. “Meet.”

“Meet,” Sylvain repeats, committing it to memory as he picks a piece of fried eggplant out of the basket. “But I’d like to see one.” 

Felix sits cross-legged on the bench they share, looking unbelievably hot as he practically inhales a takoyaki ball. A small feast sits between them, skewers of chicken and pork and tempura shrimp, a random assortment of things Sylvain had picked out while Felix got distracted by the first vendor they’d passed in the yokocho alley, one selling a startlingly impressive collection of engraved daggers.

It wasn’t hard to find a park nearby after paying for their paper-wrapped meal, and even though it’s mostly quiet, the lingering effects of the opening ceremony festivities are still apparent throughout the city. A steady stream of attendees pass them by, decked out in mostly white and red and carrying tiny decorative flags that flutter in the night breeze.

“I have qualifiers on Tuesday. You could come to those.”

It’s refreshing, how straightforward Felix is. It’s the exact opposite of how Sylvain’s always operated, always calculating, his poise and charm dialed up to a perfect ten. 

“Is that a date?” Sylvain teases. 

Felix snorts, picking at a chicken skewer. “No.”

“You should come to one of my swim meets,” he offers. “They’re at night, so they won’t conflict with yours.”

Sylvain watches as Felix tosses the empty wooden skewer back into the little paper boat between them. They’re sitting close – not as close as last night – but close nonetheless. Sylvain can see the beads of sweat on the back of Felix’s neck, brought on by the humid heat. A feral, untethered part of him wants to lean over and lick it off.

“Sure.” Felix shrugs.

A particularly loud firework goes off, a distant _boom_ coming from the stadium. Glittering sparkles rain through the air, lighting up Felix’s face in reds and blues and hot white flashes, dancing through the smudge of dark lashes against his cheek. Cheers sound through the park, and for the first time in a year, Sylvain feels a rush of contentment. Like maybe this is exactly where he’s meant to be.

“This is… nice,” Sylvain observes, for lack of a better word. 

Felix snorts, glancing away to look up at the smoky sky. “Yeah. I felt like I was going to go crazy all day.”

He’s having a hard time picturing Felix enjoying the press circus he went through today – it was almost too much for him, and _he’s_ learned to thrive off attention over the years. “Interviews?” 

“Yeah. After training they were back to back until the ceremony.” 

“Oh, same here. It was fucking exhausting.” Sylvain finishes off the last bit of meat off the remaining skewer and promptly deposits it into the pile of greasy paper wrappings.

Felix looks up at him. There’s curiosity in his gaze, a question waiting there. It’s a look Sylvain knows well, though it feels different – more honest, maybe – coming from him. “What’s up?” 

“I looked you up last night.”

Something in Sylvain’s chest sinks. He tries to laugh, but it comes out a bit shaky. It’s an effort to keep his voice level when he asks, “Yeah? Find anything good?”

Felix’s gaze cuts to his, eyes sharp but lacking judgement. “A tell-all from one of your ex-girlfriends. And a whole load of bullshit about your family.” He tilts his head back towards the sky, where the drift of firework smoke hangs over them, stretching his arms out in front of him and then back. Sylvain’s just a little distracted with how far he’s able to bend, hands arcing high behind him before folding on the back of the bench, close to his own shoulder.

“Yeah, that sounds about right.” Refraining from refuting these claims is second-nature to him now, after Dorothea had explained to him _gracefully acknowledging your wrongs and how you’re moving forward is a much better look than denial._

“Your dad sounds like a real asshole.”

_Oh, you have no idea._ Sylvain can’t help but laugh, cocking his head at Felix. It’s not the conclusion he’d expect Felix to come away with after scrolling through the first search result page, but then again, Sylvain has stopped googling himself upon strict orders from his therapist (not to mention all of his friends). Either way, he’s not wrong. “Two for two. You’re on a roll. Find anything else?”

Another shrug. “Not really.” For the second time in as many nights, Sylvain wonders how they ended up so close – Felix looks over at him through half-lidded eyes, and Sylvain thinks that he could probably count the freckles spattered through honey-gold irises if he tried. “I didn’t realize you were famous before all this.”

Sylvain unsticks his tongue from the roof of his mouth and swallows. His usual rebuttal springs to mind: _I wouldn’t count being the cherished son of a multi-billionaire business mogul as “famous.” Especially not after going on a two year long self-sabotaging bender to get myself kicked out._ His voice is rough and throaty when he finally asks: “Does that bother you?” 

Felix smirks back at him, and Sylvain finds himself leaning in, inexorably pulled there by that smile. He brings one hand up and around to trace his fingertips over where Felix’s forearm rests against the back of the bench. The moments start to melt together when Felix doesn’t pull away – if anything he leans in closer, until the periphery of Sylvain’s vision is filled with him, an attractive blush riding high across his cheeks in the dim streetlamp light. 

“Not really,” Felix repeats, lower this time. Sylvain can feel his breath hot against his lips where it washes over him; he can see the bright curiosity written across Felix’s face. It’s almost a challenge. A dare. _Do it. I know you want to._

Kissing Felix feels like free fall. 

Sylvain’s pleasantly surprised – for all of his tense, high-strung energy, Felix opens up beautifully against him, his lips soft and warm, pliant where they press against his. He shifts to pull himself closer, one tentative hand coming up to stroke featherlight against Felix’s jaw, and he’s pleased when Felix follows, arching up for more. Sylvain gives as best he can, taking the lead to dip his tongue across the curve of Felix’s lower lip, treasuring the little sigh that slips out as they tangle themselves together, Felix’s arms looping around his shoulders to steady himself.

Sylvain’s kissed a lot of people before, but he doesn’t remember the last time it felt like this. There’s hardly any space between them, the swipe of Felix’s tongue against his own sending lightning through his toes and fingertips. He finds neon warmth in the raw rose of Felix’s blush, in Felix’s hands threading through sweat-damp hair, in Felix’s lips pressing all the air from his lungs and all the thoughts from his head until they both pull away. 

If he thought Felix looked good before, well, now he looks fucking _gorgeous._ A dark blush blooms across his cheeks, azalea-pink framing hooded eyes and wet lips. The starlight reflected in Felix’s eyes makes him feel dazed, dizzied, dawns of garnet in the warm dark.

“Does _that_ bother you?” Felix quips, staring right at Sylvain’s mouth. There’s a hunger in his gaze, intense and raw and amplified when the sparkle of fireworks scatter themselves across the sky, illuminating him in soft pinks and blues. 

Sylvain has never wanted to be eaten alive more in his life.


	3. Chapter 3

_Standing in the open light  
Within the swelter of the night  
I found myself staring at you  
_ —

_In lane three, representing France, Sylvain Gautier._

Sylvain squints against the bright light as he walks out, the echo of his name being called and the following muted roar of applause muffled by his headphones. The pool is still and calm as he approaches his block to undress, turquoise prisms reflecting wet fluorescence back at him. 

He’s still riding high from last night, reveling in the impossible rush that comes with kissing Felix stupid. They’d spent the better part of the night together after grabbing a cab back to the Village (with Felix’s sweaty hand around his neck, his own creeping up the bare skin of Felix’s thigh); the lounge on their floor was dark and quiet save for Felix pulled halfway in his lap, making soft, pleased noises as they made out silhouetted by the Tokyo skyline.

(That is, until Felix had glanced at the row of clocks hanging on the wall opposite them, every timezone glowing bright blue in the dark, and promptly pulled Sylvain down the hall to their respective rooms, admonishing him about _staying up too late before a meet_ and _getting the proper amount of sleep improves performance._ They’d parted on another kiss, Felix tugging on Sylvain’s lower lip with his teeth before promising that he’d be there.)

All in all, a pretty good way to spend a Friday night.

Sylvain’s scheduled to swim the third heat, which means Felix has probably spent the last hour or so sitting in the stands of the humid aquatics stadium. The thought of him sweating in the wet air brings forth an image of Felix from last night to his mind, lips kiss-bitten, cheeks flushed, neck damp as Sylvain’s fingers encircled his waist.

He looks out over the bleachers, searching for that dark ponytail he’s dreamt of tugging on for the past two nights as he strips down, folding his track pants and jacket in a neat pile on his bench as the announcer continues to reel off names and home countries. It isn’t until he’s up on the diving block, shaking out his arms one last time that Sylvain finally sees him: seated near the middle, next to Glenn and Dimitri. Sylvain’s close enough to see the fluorescent lights catch and sparkle in the sheen of sweat beading across the top of his forehead.

_Swimmers, take your mark._

Sylvain snaps his goggles down, but not before shooting Felix a cheeky wink. Felix reacts exactly as Sylvain hoped, his blush immediate and furious as it floods down his neck and up to warm the tips of his ears. 

The single buzzer sounds and Sylvain leaps.

When Sylvain touched down two days ago, he’d been looking forward to a month of competing, eating his way through the city, and perhaps a few one-night flings. What he’d gotten was Felix: sharp and sarcastic with his constant smirks, uncaring of his past and whatever the internet had to say about it, licking into Sylvain’s mouth with a hungry ferocity only matched by the intensity of his amber gaze. 

But being back in the water reminds Sylvain of why he’s here. Swimming has always come easy for him. It’s never been particularly difficult to float and tread water, to luxuriate in the feeling of weightlessness, to dive beneath the surface and disappear from the world for a handful of stolen seconds. Sylvain grew up spending summers at private pools and his family’s second house on Lake Como; he passed every winter since he was eight at the aquatics club, swimming laps and doing drills in fleeting escapes from his family. 

(And yeah, maybe his brother tried to take that away from him with a well-timed shove into rough open water of the Mediterreanean Sea when he was twelve – but if anything that incident made him practice longer, harder, engraving the muscle memory into his very bones until he was confident he’d never drown. At least not by Miklan’s hand.)

_Push, pull, kick, breathe._

Even when he moved out he still managed to find time to swim, taking advantage of the athletic club down the street from his apartment and how it was always empty at night. The motions have always been soothing, the back-and-forth monotony of swimming laps a safe place for his mind to drift blissfully free. Later, when Claude had convinced him to join the college team _(they’re just time trials, I’ve seen you outpace all of our new recruits when you’re taking it easy)_ that calm had transitioned into a hyperfixation to push himself – if only for the fact that he alone could accomplish this. 

_Push, pull, kick, breathe._

It’s a quick race – down and back once, a neat, quick lap – and Sylvain gives it all he’s got. There’s a rhythm to follow, a pattern he’s perfected throughout the years, and he executes it flawlessly: clearing the surface just enough to fill his lungs with air as he pulls himself forward with the flat, wide span of his palms. His heartbeat competes with rushing water, splashing up in his face every time he comes up for air, but he pays it no mind, pushing himself ever-forward, closer, closer, closer–

_Push, pull, kick, breathe._

Sylvain stretches out to touch the wall and it's over just as soon as it began.

—

Rank | Heat | Lane | Name | Nationality | Time  
---|---|---|---|---|---  
1 | 3 | 4 | Ferdinand von Aegir | France | 51.50  
2 | 3 | 3 | Sylvain Gautier | France | 51.62  
  
Sylvain shakes Ferdinand’s hand from across the lane divider, shaking the sting of chlorine from his eyes once he tugs his goggles off. The cameras are probably eating it all up, this supposed rivalry of theirs, but Sylvain’s just happy to see his name up there at all, marked with a bold **Q**. 

The last heat goes by in a blur as Sylvain sits on the little portion of benches reserved for their team, too preoccupied with chugging water to pay much attention to the final results. Claude’s out taking advantage of his free day with Marianne before backstroke qualifiers tomorrow and Ferdinand disappears relatively soon after the fourth heat ends, shaking that ridiculous mane out of his swim cap specifically for the delighted, girlish cheers sounding from the bleachers.

Sylvain lingers, hoping that Felix will, too. Once the surging crowd has died down, though, the stands are empty save for a few random stragglers. None of them have dark hair or pouty scowls.

_Damn._

Sylvain circles back to the locker rooms, dragging his feet a little. The rows of lockers are quiet, all the other swimmers either gone already or wrapping up, and by the time he’s stripped off his speedo and wrapped a towel around his hips, ready to rinse the sticky humidity from his skin, Sylvain’s pretty sure he has the entire place to himself.

That is, until the digital _beep_ of a keycard echoes off pristine tile. Sylvain, on his way to the shower stalls, turns halfway to see–

“Felix?”

Felix looks faintly flushed and just this side of sheepish as he lets the door swing shut behind him, overdressed for the humidity of the locker room: black leggings and track jacket half-zipped to reveal the rainbow of bruises Sylvain had kissed there last night. The sight of Felix marked by _him_ does weird things to Sylvain’s stomach, hope and something bordering on possessive flaring sharp and bright.

“Hey,” Felix says.

“Hey yourself.” Sylvain’s mind feels stuck on loop: _Felix waited for you. He_ waited _for you!_ “How’d you get in?”

Felix reaches into the pocket of his jacket, flashing his laminated athlete’s badge with a coy smirk. _Oh, right._ “I’m competing too, idiot.”

Giddiness kicks in, a bolt of lightning crackling through his core as he takes in Felix standing in front of him, looking thoroughly kissable. Alone. In a locker room.

_“So?_ What’d you think?” Sylvain flashes Felix his best smile as he takes a seat on the low wooden bench opposite him. Maybe if he hadn’t grown up running around half-naked in a speedo he’d be more ashamed about having a conversation in only a skimpy towel, but Felix doesn’t seem bothered much by it – he crosses his arms, leaning against the row of lockers opposite Sylvain, a small frown on his face.

“Not bad.”

Now it’s Sylvain’s turn to frown. “Not bad? I’m going to semifinals – I think that warrants more than a _not bad.”_

Felix laughs, an unexpected sound that echoes off the tiled walls and fills Sylvain with warmth. He can feel his self-restraint slipping, the urge to stand up and crowd Felix against that row of lockers growing increasingly tempting by the second. “Fine, you’re right. Congrats.”

“Do I get a prize?”

It slips from Sylvain’s mouth before he can take it back, the double-meaning clearly not lost on Felix as he starts to walk towards him, hips swaying. Sylvain finds himself utterly unable to look away, but why would he want to when Felix is standing over him, staring down with an amused smile. Sylvain’s fingers twitch, itching to reach up and drag Felix into his arms again for another night of making out until the sun comes up.

Felix scoffs, but it’s a soft, gentle noise lacking any venom as he carefully lowers himself onto Sylvain’s lap. His knees spread wide on either side of Sylvain’s thighs, balancing expertly, not even steadying himself against Sylvain’s chest as the weight of him comes to rest on the towel wrapped precariously around his hips. 

And yeah, this probably isn’t the most brilliant idea Sylvain’s ever had, but his mind is too busy short-circuiting to think much of little things like consequences right now. It’s not like being found in compromising positions in empty locker rooms is the worst thing that’s ever happened to him. He skims the tips of his fingers up the outside of Felix’s thighs, trailing hot desire until they meet at the center of Felix’s back, rubbing circles down the bones of his spine. Their faces are leveled out like this, making it easy for Sylvain to lean in for a kiss, tangling one hand through the sweat-sticky hair gathered into a messy bun at the nape of Felix’s neck.

It’s just as good as last night, lighting every dopamine receptor in Sylvain’s brain up _just right,_ perfect in a way that makes him wonder why he ever settled for anything less. He’d be content to kiss just like this for hours, but it seems Felix has other ideas based on the way he bites at Sylvain’s lower lip, dragging pink crescents down the length of his bare back, mapping across the muscles of his shoulders, hands all over him. Sylvain returns the favor in kind, heat pooling in his gut in a way that has nothing to do with the humidity and residual steam, squeezing Felix’s hips through his leggings, tipping his jaw up and to the side to press a flurry of kisses to the pale column of his throat.

“This is a bad idea,” Felix pulls away to breathe against him, eyes half-lidded, aglow with desire.

“Yeah,” Sylvain agrees, head spinning. “No one’s here?” he offers, a half-question, half-statement, still punch-drunk and hazy. 

Felix’s hands come up to cup each side of Sylvain’s jaw, pulling him into another breathless kiss. “Good enough for me,” he pants, all flushed cheeks and mussed hair. 

And Sylvain can’t really argue with that – he also can’t argue with Felix slipping off his lap to kneel on the tile between his spread legs, fingers plucking at where the towel is tucked snug around his waist, the curve of his wrist brushing against where Sylvain’s half-hard beneath the fabric. “Fuck,” Sylvain swears, because the sight of Felix on his knees before him, eyes bright with a specific kind of hunger, is nearly enough to make him come untouched right there.

But then Felix pulls aside the towel, watching as Sylvain’s cock springs up to slap against his belly, already leaking from the tip. He groans when Felix diverts his attention to the muscle of his inner thighs, sucking a cluster of bruises there as one hand strokes up and down the crease of his opposite hip, never quite close enough to where Sylvain needs him most. Sylvain tries to be good. He can tell that Felix wants to take his time with this, so he clenches his palms into the smooth wood of the bench and shuts his eyes, dizzy with desire.

When Felix finally, _finally_ inches up to where he’s fully hard, Sylvain almost wants to cry in relief. Instead he breathes out a long, low moan, because Felix’s tongue against his cock feels fucking _unholy_ in the most divine way, and even though he’s only wrapped his lips around the tip, he already wants nothing more than to fuck up into Felix’s hot little mouth, to come hard down his throat as he hollows his cheeks and dips a wet finger up beneath his balls. 

Sylvain squirms as he watches Felix swallow him down, completely single-minded in his task, eyebrows furrowed in concentration as Sylvain feels the head of his cock finally, _finally_ hit the back of Felix’s throat.

“Fuck, _fuck,”_ he pants, unable to look away, even when sweat rolls in fat beads down his temple, hands shaking as he reaches down to cradle the sides of Felix’s face. And then _Felix_ moans appreciatively, and that little sound spurs Sylvain on, his hips hitching against Felix’s mouth.

_He likes this,_ Sylvain realizes, bucking shallowly up once more to yet another strangled sigh, Felix’s mouth stretched wide and red around him. “Felix, I’m– I’m close,” he pants out as a warning, feeling his orgasm rise hot and heavy in him, a wave threatening to crest. Sylvain loosens his hold on Felix’s face, tries to let his hips go lax, but Felix buries his face close to his skin and _swallows,_ and Sylvain sees stars. He’s dimly aware that Felix is grinding against his own hand through his leggings, but he’s in no position to help, not when Felix’s lashes flutter on a throaty moan, pitching Sylvain head-over-heels into a sudden, blinding orgasm, head spinning as he comes hard down Felix’s perfect throat.

“Holy shit,” Sylvain pants, limbs trembling as Felix lets his softening cock slip out of his mouth, that devilish pink tongue darting out to lick his lips. “Holy _shit,_ Felix.”

“Was that a good enough prize?” Felix’s sarcastic drawl would be more impressive if his voice wasn’t completely wrecked, but the raspiness is hot all the same. Sylvain uses what’s left of his strength to pull Felix up into his arms, kissing him breathless, ridiculously turned on by the taste of himself still in Felix’s mouth. His hands move down to palm at Felix’s ass through his leggings, feeling the hot line of Felix’s erection against his belly.

“Can I–” Sylvain asks, stilted and too formal, his brain still leaking out of his ears from the aftermath of the best orgasm he’s had in years.

Felix grins. It’s a wild, feral thing, and in that moment Sylvain thinks _holy shit, is this love?_

_There’s a humming in the restless summer air  
And we’re slipping off the course that we prepared  
But in all chaos there is calculation  
Dropping glasses just to hear them break  
_ —

Sylvain wakes up to three things: a headache, his phone ringing, and someone attempting to pound his door down.

None of these are particularly welcome, especially when the alarm clock in his room flashes _5:54AM_ from the bedside table. Sylvain groans and pulls himself out of bed, muting his phone – it’s just Dorothea, he’ll get back to her later, when it isn’tthe asscrack of dawn – and pulls on a pair of boxers as he shuffles over to the harsh, furious rap of knuckles against the wood.

He stutters out a bleary “hello?” through a yawn as he opens it, only to get rudely pushed aside by Felix, who storms in, a whirlwind of furious energy.

“Have you seen this? Have you _fucking_ seen this?” Felix hisses, already halfway down the hall before he doubles back, arm outstretched, waving his phone around in Sylvain’s face. The look on his face borders on unhinged. 

Sylvain frowns, wrapping a hand around Felix’s to steady it, his eyes still adjusting to the bright screen in the dim pre-dawn morning. “No?” It takes him a moment to realize that Felix is actually _shaking_ beneath him. 

_Love in Tokyo: French Athletes Turn Up the Heat Sunday Night – Exclusive Photos!_

“Fuck.” 

Felix laughs, a short, humorless sound. Sylvain clicks the article link, which redirects him to a pop-up infested website, repeating the headline (it seems ruder, somehow, in all caps) and a short article beneath:

_French gymnast Felix Fraldarius was caught sneaking into the swim team’s locker rooms after Sunday night’s qualifying events ended. It turns out Fraldarius, 23, wasn’t switching sports, but visiting his boyfriend, Sylvain Gautier! Gautier, 25, also of France, qualified for the men’s 100-metre butterfly event earlier that night. The two lovebirds spent some quality time alone after Gautier placed second with a qualifying time of 51.62 — check out the salacious photo gallery below!_

Sylvain looks up before scrolling any further, his heart sinking hard and fast.

“Fuck,” he repeats eloquently. Felix’s scowl sharpens when Sylvain looks up. “There wasn’t anyone else in the locker rooms with us.” It sounds dumb saying it out loud, because _obviously_ someone was there – the proof is there, in the blurry cropped shot of Felix perched on Sylvain’s lap accompanying the article’s headline. “Press aren’t even _allowed_ in there.”

Felix snorts, shaking his wrist free of Sylvain’s, taking his phone back to scroll down to the photo gallery. “Well, they don’t seem to give a fuck about that.”

“Apparently not,” Sylvain replies back, the gears in his brain turning slowly, still waking up.

They’ve only known each other for a handful of days, and while Sylvain knows they’re far off from being _anything,_ now or in the future, _“his boyfriend, Sylvain Gautier”_ rings like ill-fated wedding bells in his ears. His stomach turns at the implication, but now clearly isn’t the time, not when Felix won’t stop pacing back and forth in front of his unmade bed, glued to his phone.

Sylvain wants to wrap him up and soothe this nervous, jittery energy away by picking up right where they left off last night, but instead he grabs his phone and two iced coffees from the mini fridge. He’s done morning-after damage control a dozen times before, and he’s always needed a _lot_ of caffeine to get through it.

Felix is muttering to himself as he scrolls, and Sylvain catches the tail end of it: “Fuck. Right before qualifiers, too, that’s all they’re going to be talking about–”

“Here.” Sylvain passes the coffee to Felix, who takes it without looking, still absorbed in his phone. Sylvain checks his own: 17 missed calls from Dorothea, 6 texts from Claude, and 1 call from Byleth, not to mention a staggering number of notifications hovering in the corner of the little blue Twitter icon. _Damn._

“What do we do?” Felix turns to him, and there’s a flicker of despair in his eyes behind the surface-level anger and disbelief. 

For the longest time, Sylvain had been content to let the press rip him to shreds everytime he stumbled out of a club well-past the crack of dawn – almost gleeful, in a twisted sort of way, that his plan to escape his father’s chokehold was actually working. Dragging his own name through the mud probably wasn’t the smartest or most strategic method, but it worked – at least at the time. Now and then pieces of his past come back to bite him from time to time, but everybody loves a comeback story, and it was right around the time he started swimming he’d met Dorothea. 

A mutual friend of Claude’s, Dorothea is fun and hot and sharp as a tack. The first party they’d found themselves at together, Sylvain distinctly remembers finding it difficult to _not_ fall a little in love with her – despite being _distinctly_ uninterested in Sylvain. He’d been weighing the pros and cons of asking her on a date when she’d given him an earth-shattering once-over and said _you’re that disaster who’s always in the news, yeah?_

They’d been fast friends after that, and when Twitter had a heyday over Miklan’s arrest (and how Sylvain was clearly on track to follow in his brother’s footsteps), Dorothea had been the one to help him craft his first statement to the press. He’d started paying her a small salary soon after to help clean up the messes from years ago that were coming back to haunt him, and she’d done an impeccable job so far.

“We call Dorothea.” Sylvain’s already unlocking his phone, scrolling to her contact info.

Felix stops his pacing to look up at him. “Who?” 

—

“So,” Dorothea’s voice buzzes with clear irritation through the static of the call. “You’re telling me that you hooked up in a locker room,” she counts off with her fingers, listing out their crimes in that brutally honest way Sylvain’s come to admire (and fear), “someone got photos of it, and you expect me to make this just – _poof!_ – all disappear?”

Sylvain scratches the back of his head, ruffling his sleep-mussed hair. “Yes?”

It’s not quite the response he’d hoped for, especially after reassuring a panicky Felix – _Dorothea is amazing, she’s been helping me with press garbage-fires for years now, if anyone can do something to fix it, it’s her –_ as the cheery dial tone rang halfway across the world. Dorothea rubs her temples and lets out a long sigh, one Sylvain feels like echoing.

“Have you said anything to anyone? No tweets, no Insta-stories?”

Sylvain looks over to Felix, who just shakes his head, arms crossed, looking petulant sitting cross-legged at the edge of the low sofa that faces his bed. “Nope. You’re the first person I called.”

She snorts. “I appreciate the confidence.”

Felix huffs miserably. “I don’t even _have_ a fucking Twitter.”

“I noticed.” Sylvain watches Dorothea prop her phone up against her laptop screen, the rapid click of nails against the keyboard echoing through his phone’s speaker. “It looks like the article was posted late last night, Tokyo time. Did you see the photos?”

There’s a handful of blurry locker-room shots, mostly variations from the same angle: Felix kneeling before Sylvain on the tiled floor, his head buried between his thighs while Sylvain’s hands are fisted through dark hair, head tilted back on an open-mouthed moan. It’s not explicit, necessarily, but there’s just enough in frame to clearly insinuate their, er, _post-meet celebration,_ as one website so delicately put it. 

Almost more embarrassing (at least for Sylvain) are the other photos in the set – ones from the night after the opening ceremony. Even though it’d been dark, the illumination of the fireworks lit up both of their faces clearly, Sylvain’s hand cupping Felix’s cheek in a way that spoke nothing of being almost-strangers and everything of intimate affection.

“Yeah,” Sylvain and Felix answer in unison. Felix shoots him a glare before looking back down at his phone, scrolling too fast to actually read anything.

“The fact that you haven’t responded – confirmed _or_ denied it – is good,” Dorothea continues, hands flying across the keyboard. This, more than anything, grabs Felix’s attention, and he shuffles towards where Sylvain’s sitting against the headboard, shouldering against him until he’s in the front-camera’s frame. Sylvain tries his best to ignore the warm press of Felix against him, how he could probably just lift his arm and tuck Felix into his side and it’d be a perfect fit. 

“Why would I confirm something that’s _clearly_ not true?” Felix asks.

The typing pauses. Dorothea looks up, meeting Felix’s glare with cool, level-headed ambivalence. “Would you rather have the press tweeting about your trashy locker-room hookup or about you placing in your next event?”

Sylvain watches Felix’s face fall in the tiny thumbnail reflection, embarrassed heat radiating off of him as he goes silent.

“Yeah, didn’t think so. I know your knee-jerk reaction is to deny it, but I’m finding… a _lot_ of positive feedback about this.”

Felix snorts. “About what? A locker room blowjob?”

Sylvain can’t help but wince – but then again, he should probably be counting his blessings that the camera hadn’t followed them into the private shower stalls after, where he spent a good half-hour repaying the favor until Felix’s knees buckled in pleasure.

“No, about you two. Everyone thinks you’re… a cute couple.” Dorothea sounds incredulous, maybe even a little disgusted.

Sylvain tilts the phone back towards him. “Hey, don’t sound so surprised!”

This gets him a glare from both Felix and Dorothea. Which, fair. 

“Ugh.” Felix unfolds his legs with alarming grace, pacing the small perimeter of Sylvain’s room with the same nervous energy as before.

“So… what do we do?” Sylvain asks, eyes following Felix as he completes a lap.

Dorothea sighs, clearly flicking through her timeline. “It’s up to you, Sylvie. But it wouldn’t hurt if you wanted to just keep quiet and lay low for a few days.” 

“I can’t exactly _lay low,_ I’m competing in three days,” Felix snarls. 

Privately, Sylvain agrees – his race against Ferdinand creeps closer by the day, and if the hype before they even got to Tokyo was anything to go by, he’ll be swarmed for interviews for at least a few days before _and_ after the actual event.

Dorothea shrugs. “Well, you could always just fake it. Pretend you’re together for a few weeks… I bet you’d get some good press out of it.”

Felix stops dead in the middle of another lap around the room, looking near-mutinous. Sylvain feels like his world was just turned upside down. Dorothea has suggested some off-the-wall shit to him before, but _this_ definitely takes the cake. _“What?”_

“Ooh, come on, think about it!” Sylvain, unfortunately, recognizes that tone of Dorothea’s, the one that’s one-hundred-percent bad decisions – _fun_ bad decisions, but bad decisions nonetheless. “It’d be easy, and both of you could use good press right now–” Sylvain considers hanging up right then and there, because Felix looks like he’s going to snatch his phone and chuck it out the window, “–there isn’t an Olympic sweetheart couple yet this year, you’d only need to give a few interviews and the press would eat it _up–”_

“Thea,” Sylvain tries to cut her off, but it’s a weak, halfhearted protest. He has the sinking feeling that she’s not going to let this go, and Dorothea can be _extremely_ persuasive when she wants to be.

Felix huffs. “What makes you think I’d _ever_ agree to pretend to be _his_ boyfriend?”

_“Ouch.”_

Both Felix and Dorothea ignore him. 

Dorothea hums, tapping her lower lip with her finger. “Sponsorships.” 

They all fall silent, the word heavy as it hangs in the air between them. Sylvain hasn’t had any offers yet, and if Felix truly doesn’t have any sort of social presence, he doubts that he has any sponsors either. Sponsorship money is key to getting anywhere, especially with the exorbitant costs associated with competing around the world – flights, hotels, gear, gym memberships, trainers and coaches all add up. The perks can be pretty good, too; Sylvain distinctly remembers when Ferdinand signed with L’Oreal and they’d sent him a massive parcel with dozens of shampoos and conditioners, detanglers and mousse.

But maybe more importantly is the opportunity to be close to Felix. And yeah, that’s probably a little selfish, but there’s something addicting and magnetic about being on the receiving end of Felix’s attention, and Sylvain would be lying if he said he didn’t want more: more kisses on park benches and walking through vibrant, winding alleyways in search of late-night snacks; more nights spent worshipping the sharp curves of Felix’s body under the shower spray; more of the free-fall butterflies in his stomach whenever he catches Felix’s hungry, dark gaze.

It sounds fucking wild, and Sylvain knows that he should probably say _absolutely not,_ but he finds himself nodding into his phone. “Alright. I’m game.”

Dorothea smiles, looking delighted. Felix, on the other hand, has reached an entirely new level of crimson. _“What?”_

Sylvain’s heart tightens in his chest as he slips into that bubbly, careless veneer he perfected so long ago. He shrugs, looking directly at Felix. “We’ll still go our separate ways after we go home. The press will move on, they always do.” 

Felix just stares back. Sylvain watches his lower lip twitch, his eyes downcast, his arms start to loosen where they’re crossed over his chest. Sylvain can’t help the grin that’s tugging at the corner of his lips that he barely suppresses. “It’s like Dorothea said. An interview or two, and we would have plenty of time together for me to do more of what we did last night in the shower–”

_“Gross,”_ Dorothea says at the same time Felix turns an even brighter shade of red and sputters, “Fuck. Okay. _Fine.”_

—

Twenty minutes after he’s hung up on Dorothea (who started chattering at lightspeed once Felix agreed, a blur of something about _scheduling interviews_ and _double photoshoot_ and _the best scam of the Olympics),_ Sylvain finds himself belly-down between Felix’s legs, two fingers deep as he admires the impossible bend of his body, knees pushed up to frame his face like it’s nothing. His fists are clenched into Sylvain’s sheets, looking like something out of Sylvain’s filthiest wet dreams, hair mussed and cheeks flushed.

“Don’t think this means anything,” Felix pants out, breathless. Sylvain smirks against his hip, purposefully avoiding where Felix’s cock twitches, hard and leaking against his taut belly. He’s been with other athletes before – swimmers, mostly – but never a gymnast. It’s a little addicting, the easy way Felix’s body stretches under his touch with no resistance.

“Mm.” He licks a stripe across the head of Felix’s cock, flushed pink and pretty. “’Course not.” 

Felix growls through clenched teeth, fingers threading through Sylvain’s sleep-wrecked hair. Sylvain grins wide up at him. “I– I mean it. I’m not looking for a boyfriend.”

“Me neither,” Sylvain agrees. (But he thinks that maybe, he could get used to the little cries Felix makes, the way his strong, calloused hands cup his cheeks to guide him down, the traitorous flutter of his heart against his ribcage at every earned smile.) “You’ll find,” he murmurs into the crease of Felix’s thigh, “I’m very good–” he curves his finger up, searching for that spot that made Felix fall apart last night, “at no strings attached.”

Felix keens, early morning light filtered low through flickering lashes. He looks undeniable like this, sprawled out on Sylvain’s bed, a delicate thread of spit smeared from the corner of his lips. Sylvain can almost convince himself that their call with Dorothea was just a bad dream, that they’ve spent the morning kissing and wringing orgasms out of each other like it’s a competition, that those locker room photos never existed, that he doesn’t feel sparks fly whenever Felix looks at him.

“G-good,” Felix stutters, hips bucking up in a weak effort to ride Sylvain’s face. “Now are you gonna fuck me or what?”

Sylvain grins, free hand twisting in the lycra-spandex of Felix’s hastily pulled down leggings, pausing to admire the way they frame his ass and the velvet swell of his balls before tugging them all the way off. “Getting to it, sweetheart.” Felix holds onto the backs of his bare thighs and pulls them up to frame his face, his puffy hole newly exposed and twitching around Sylvain’s fingers. Sylvain whistles, low and impressed. _“Fuck,_ you’re flexible.”

“I’m not your _sweetheart–”_ Felix grits out, his thought breaking off into a gasp when Sylvain pulls out to fumble for his bag of toiletries on the low bedside table. He nearly trips over himself getting back to Felix, who in his brief absence has taken to rutting into his own hand, making muffled little whines into Sylvain’s pillow. Sylvain bats his hand away, much to Felix’s displeasure – he makes this adorable, grumpy noise that sounds kind of like a pissed off cat – but then he’s slipping a condom on and slicking himself up, and _oh,_ Felix takes him so well as he feeds his cock in, in, in. _A perfect fit,_ some strange, primal part of his brain whispers. _Like he was made for you._

“I know, baby,” Sylvain murmurs, effortlessly folding Felix in half, rocking his hips in little waves that have Felix making these little _ah-ah-ah_ sounds beneath him. He sets a hard, fast pace immediately, letting his hips drive Felix up the bed until his back is arching gracefully against the headboard. Felix meets every thrust with fierce determination, and Sylvain nearly comes right there when Felix locks each hand around his ankles and pulls them up above his head, his feet nearly touching his ears while Sylvain’s cock sinks impossibly _deeper._

“Fuck, look at you,” he babbles, hands squeezing Felix’s hips. Sylvain doesn’t know exactly what’s coming out of his mouth, but the words flow freely as he chases his pleasure in the tight, wet heat of Felix’s body. “You’re fucking _perfect,_ do you know that?”

“S-Shut up, shut _up,”_ Felix groans, one clumsy hand moving to grip around Sylvain’s jaw, thumb swiping spit across his lower lip. It feels like he’s touched live wire when Felix’s fingers dip into his mouth, every nerve alight with white molten heat. Felix’s cries grow in volume as Sylvain continues to fuck them both closer to the edge, drooling around where he’s got two fingers hooked over his teeth. It’s almost unbearable, borderline painful, how turned on he is by the sight of Felix beneath him; his brows furrowed in concentration as he bends and stretches to take his cock so well, simultaneously fucking his fingers in and out of Sylvain’s mouth.

“I’m, I’m–” Felix moans, and Sylvain somehow knows exactly what he means, because he’s there – or at least pretty damn close – too. He fists Felix’s cock and it only takes a couple of easy tugs until he’s coming across his belly on a pitched moan. Sylvain pulls out as Felix trembles and twitches through the aftershocks, tossing the condom aside and jerking himself rough and fast until he comes all over Felix’s stomach.

He collapses on the bed, feeling like his entire world has just been flipped upside down and sideways.

It’s Felix, surprisingly, who breaks the silence.

“Fuck.” It sounds broken, punched out of his chest. Sylvain turns onto his side to see Felix gazing back at him, eyes half-lidded and hazy, looking thoroughly wrecked. He reaches out to thumb a strand of drool away from Felix’s chin, and he can’t help but laugh, soft and disbelieving, when Felix presses his cheek up, just the tiniest bit, into his touch.

“Yeah.” And even though he’s the self-proclaimed king of one-night-stands, there’s a rush of unexpected warmth that whispers Felix might just prove to be his downfall. “Yeah. _Fuck.”_


	4. Chapter 4

_I’m a bad liar  
With a savior complex  
All the skeletons you hide  
Show me yours, and I’ll show you mine  
_ —

Sylvain quickly discovers that having a fake boyfriend is more exhausting than actually being in a relationship. 

(Not like he would know very much about being in a real, committed relationship. He’s only had two of those, both ending in dramatic disagreements and Sylvain’s clothes getting thrown out apartment windows to scatter across the sidewalk.) 

In a lot of ways, it fucking sucks. The uncertainty and expectations mix into a muddy cocktail of _is this for real or pretend?_ and _what the fuck are we even doing,_ punctuated by awkward hand-holding and staged kisses. It has Sylvain hesitating, suddenly unsure in an arena he’s _never_ been unsure in. Dorothea laughs when he tells her this, teasing him as only good friends can do: _isn’t it a nice change of pace, Sylvie?_

But then Felix flashes him a rare smile, or laughs at one of his stupid jokes, or pulls him into a bruising kiss in the back of a cab, windows down as they speed through Tokyo skies, and Sylvain thinks _hey, maybe this isn’t so bad._

The next week passes by in a blur of training in the morning, events in the afternoon, and spending evenings with Felix. They show up to each other’s meets at Dorothea’s insistence – _it gives the press good content without you having to do interviews._ Sylvain brings him to the sprawling juice bar downstairs every morning and laughs when Felix wrinkles his nose through whatever uber-healthy, neon-green spinach and spirulina concoction is the special of the day. Felix even grants him a begrudging smile after he qualifies for semifinals in two of his main events – which the cameras pick up on immediately. The resulting photos catch Sylvain looking _far_ too happy to be there from the bleachers.

And Dorothea was right (she usually is) – the press eats it _up._ They haven’t even done a single interview when the headlines start popping up, dubbing them _the cutest couple of Tokyo 2020._ The first article takes off, and the scandalous nature of their locker room tryst is tamped down to something less dirty and more passionately sweet, now that they’re _dating_ and so clearly in love.

(Sylvain tries to ignore the way his stomach turns whenever he sees these photos.)

“So, how long has Felix been a gymnast?” 

Sylvain figures it’s probably a bland, safe bet to start off his first ever conversation with Glenn. Especially when all Sylvain knows is that a) he’s never seen him smile, b) he’s probably fucking Dimitri, and c) he probably, definitely hates Sylvain for faking an entire relationship with his little brother. 

They’ve been waiting side-by-side in the fourth row for twenty minutes now as white-poloed officials clear the floor and check each piece of equipment a dozen times over. Felix has already warmed up – it’s his first final, horizontal bars – and Sylvain’s been alternating between scrolling through Twitter and sneaking glances over at Glenn, who’s watching the arena with that same slightly bored look on his face. He regrets not having Dimitri here to help break the tension, but he’s stuck at practice this afternoon, which Glenn skipped in favor of watching his brother compete for his first medal.

“He switched over when he was eight,” Glenn replies, not taking his eyes off of the arena.

Interesting. Sylvain has a difficult time imagining him in any other sport: Felix seems made for it, all sinewy muscle and upper body strength and flexibility. “Switched from what?”

It takes Glenn a bit longer to reply this time. He scans the arena as the announcer calls the beginning of the meet, reeling off a list of names and home countries to a parade of serious, spandex-clad athletes. “Lacrosse.”

Things start to click together as _Felix Fraldarius of France_ is called, static-laced over the speaker. Felix walks out, dwarfed by his over-ear headphones, looking as serious as Sylvain’s ever seen him in a tight leotard and tiny little shorts. The high cut of it (thankfully) hides the plum collar of hickies Sylvain had sucked there two nights ago. Sylvain feels a swell of warmth rise up, one he’s been desperately trying to tamp down over the last week, rearing its head whenever Felix walks in the room. 

Felix hasn’t told him the full story, but he’s been able to fill in details based on context alone – the way the dynamic shifts whenever Glenn is with them, or, perhaps more telling, how Felix freezes up for a split second whenever Dimitri walks into the room. There’s a reason why Felix shies away whenever Sylvain asks him if Dimitri would like to go to get food with them, or if Glenn would be coming along, the foolproof way he redirects Sylvain’s attention by leaning in for a lingering kiss or sassing him back with rude sarcasm. 

And although Sylvain doubts it, maybe Glenn’s more talkative than Felix. It wouldn’t hurt to ask… right?

“Is that how you know Dimitri?”

Glenn shrugs. “Yeah. We were all in the same league growing up.”

_Wait._ “We?You too?”

The disbelief in Sylvain’s voice must be clear, because Glenn’s got an almost-smirk on his face when he turns towards him. “Yeah.”

They both fall silent when the first competitor, a young man with blue hair and bright, boisterous energy dusts his hands with chalk, shaking the tension from his arms as his coach hoists him up to the tall bar in the center of the arena. “What happened?” Sylvain whispers. It’s quiet but not completely silent, but Glenn still glares at him, eyes narrowed. 

“What do you mean?”

The gymnast performs flawlessly, spinning in perfect loops that are too quick for Sylvain to even really understand what’s happening or if the laws of gravity actually apply in this sport until it’s played back in slow-motion on the scatter of giant screens overhead. They both clap politely after he sticks the landing with a wide, triumphant grin.

“Do you still compete?”

Glenn scrutinizes him with an unreadable expression. “No.”

Sylvain waits. _15.708_ flashes on the scoreboard.

“I stopped playing two years ago,” Glenn says. If Sylvain had to pinpoint the odd tone of his voice, he’d almost call it indifferent. Detached, even. It’s nothing like how he sounds when he talks about Felix: proud, warm, _happy._

“Yeah?”

“Head injury. Caught a shot off the top pipe of the goal right under my helmet.” Glenn taps the base of his skull and Sylvain can’t help but wince. He’s seen some nasty shit growing up in the pool with divers and water polo players, but never anything so _violent._

“Shit, man. I’m sorry.”

Glenn shrugs, nonchalant as ever. “Not your fault.”

Sylvain doesn’t really know what to say to that, so he falls back into silence. The next four gymnasts pass by in a blur of spandex and intermittent applause. Sylvain hazily remembers Felix telling him earlier that morning that he’s scheduled somewhere near the end of the twelve finalists (Sylvain remembers their shower together with more clarity, remembers the muscled planes of Felix’s stomach beneath his hands and the sculpted line of Felix’s neck beneath his teeth, the sharp, amused flash of amber peering at him through falling water.)

“Felix likes you, you know.” 

Sylvain turns, thoroughly surprised that Glenn is the one initiating this conversation. The words cut straight through him, overly honest and too sincere. He smiles, wide and plasticky at the edges. “I should hope so. We _are_ dating.”

Glenn had been the first one Felix told after that fateful Facetime with Dorothea (and Dimitri shortly afterward, not because Felix wanted to, but because he’d perked up once he’d overheard the sound of their voices from where he was brushing his teeth in the bathroom). He seemed apprehensive about the whole plan, which: _fair._ But they’re in public, surrounded by hundreds of other spectators and fans, and if there was ever a time to maintain the whole fake-dating facade, it’s right now.

“I mean it. Felix doesn’t just _hook up_ with anyone.” Glenn’s tone gets quiet, gentle, deadly. “Don’t fuck this up.”

Sylvain swallows. His ears feel like they’ve been filled with fuzzy cotton. “What?”

Annoyance shoots through him at the insinuation that he’d be the one to sabotage their ruse and not Felix. Bitterness follows soon after, rising in his throat like a shitty chaser to a particularly nasty shot – at the fact that Felix has someone like this at all to support and protect him, while Sylvain’s family sits halfway across the world, unknowing, unwatching, uncaring. 

_From France, Felix Fraldarius,_ the announcer calls, scattering Sylvain’s ugly thoughts as he nearly snaps his neck to get a glimpse of Felix. He looks determined but calm as he walks out from the roped-off sidelines, but the slightest twitch of his fingers betrays the nervous energy thrumming there as he raises one hand in brief acknowledgement of his name being called and steps up to the bar.

Gymnastics is a whole different mental game, Sylvain realizes as the audience falls to a low murmur and Felix begins to gather momentum, toes pointed, the muscles along his arms contracting in sharp lines as he warms up. At least with swimming there’s the chaotic, unpredictable rush of water in his ears, effectively blocking out the audience; only the cool indifference of the electronic touchpads to judge his performance. Sylvain leans forward in his seat, watching as Felix spins faster, faster, _faster–_

He tucks his body and _spins,_ so quickly Sylvain can’t really comprehend it, but then he’s somehow contorted himself to land perfectly with two hands back on the bar, completing the full revolution in one seamless, fluid motion. A light smattering of applause echoes throughout the stadium, and Sylvain joins in, louder than anyone around them. There’s a handful of easy spins in between that turn and the next as Felix recenters himself and begins to gather speed again.

The thing is, Felix makes it look so _easy,_ floating above and around the bar like a dream, twisting and flipping the length of his body in graceful, arcing waves. He completes another turn with his spine straight, nimble arms pulling and pushing to fling him over the bar, legs spread wide in a pointed _v,_ fingertips catching on at the very last moment. Sylvain feels like his breath is caught in his throat as he twists again, the crowd’s roar slowly creeping up in volume as he tucks his knees and makes one, two, three, _four_ revolutions through the air, flying with perfect precision to stick the landing.

When the crowd goes wild, Sylvain does, too, a wide grin etched onto his face as Felix twists his arms up, victorious, the closest Sylvain’s ever seen him to _beaming._ His hands hurt a little from clapping so hard, but it’s all worth it when Felix scans the stands and catches his eye. Sylvain blows him a kiss and a wink, something in his chest burning at the bright blush that immediately flares across Felix’s cheeks.

“Holy shit,” Sylvain breathes once Felix has walked back to the row of benches. He dabs a towel across the sweat-sheen on his forehead, eyes glued to the scoreboard until a look of relief, then joy, crosses his face.

Name | Nationality | Difficulty | Execution | Penalties | Score  
---|---|---|---|---|---  
Felix Fraldarius | France | 7.300 | 8.366 | 0.0 | 15.566  
  
And then, in the corner, right next to his name, a tiny number _2_ animates in, gleaming silver.

“Holy _shit,”_ Glenn repeats.

“Did he just place?” Sylvain asks, awe-stricken. “Did he just get a medal?”

“Maybe,” Glenn answers, leaning over the row of seats below theirs to peer closer at the lineup. “There’s still two more to go, but if they don’t get a higher score than him, he just got silver.”

They don’t talk for the rest of the event, other than the quiet _yes!_ Sylvain exhales under his breath when the next competitor wobbles after his dismount, taking a single step back for a final score of 14.033. Glenn looks as lively as he’s ever seen him, and Sylvain can feel the anxious energy thrumming under his skin as the last athlete – a slender, silver-haired man from England – sticks his landing. 

His legs bounce restlessly through the handful of nervous minutes at the end, and he watches Felix pacing back and forth down on the sidelines with the other athletes as the judges review the final scoring. Worst-case scenario, he’s bumped down from second to third, but that still means a medal, his _first_ one, and the brief, unwelcome thought that maybe he’s a little bit too excited for someone he’s not even in an actual relationship with flits across his mind. But then the scoreboard updates, and–

Rank | Name | Nationality | Score  
---|---|---|---  
1 | Caspar von Bergliez | Germany | 15.708  
2 | Felix Fraldarius | France | 15.566  
3 | Ashe Duran | England | 15.400  
  
Sylvain cheers just as loud as Glenn does, grinning like a maniac when Felix takes his spot on the podium, iridescent silver bright and blinding in the camera flashes.

—

“Are you _sure_ you don’t want to go out and celebrate?” 

Sylvain nudges Felix’s knee with his own under the table. Felix shakes his head, busy shuffling the deck of cards they’d found on one of the low tables littered throughout their floor’s lounge. After his win earlier that afternoon, Felix had requested hot wings and a cold beer, two things Sylvain was more than happy to provide (along with a _very_ thorough round of bendy, athletic shower sex that involved Felix basically doing the vertical splits). 

“Not really.” Felix holds the deck out and Sylvain diligently cuts it. Their fingers brush; he tamps down the warmth blooming in his chest. 

“Not even one drink?”

Felix deals them each five cards. Dimitri and Glenn are sitting on either side of the table, preoccupied by watching a rerun event from earlier today – women’s tennis, it looks like – to pick up the hands Felix deals them. 

“Annie wants to go out on Friday after her finals. Might as well just wait until then.” Felix looks up at him over his hand of cards. “You can come if you want.”

He’d met Annie – Annette – and her tennis partner, Ingrid, at one of the various mixers in the Village earlier that week. It was then he’d learned that Felix didn’t just come from a family of athletes, he came from a family of _Olympians,_ who were close friends with _other_ Olympic families in a weird, close-knit network of world-class athletes. Ingrid had grown up with Felix and Dimitri, and Annette met Ingrid at a tennis club, and their friend-circle had just expanded from there.

(Annette had animatedly explained all of this while Ingrid and Felix were busy getting drinks.)

Sylvain’s trying to conceal how his heart started beating faster at the casual invitation when Dimitri turns back towards the table at the start of a commercial break, flipping over his own hand. “Ingrid and Annette made it through to semi-finals,” he says brightly.

Felix snorts derisively. “Yeah, Annie texted me about it. Like, three hours ago.”

“Oh.” Dimitri’s face falls fractionally.

“Ready?” Felix asks, straightening out the edges of his cards against the table, a cascade of impatient little taps. Sylvain fans out his hand – two queens, a king, a ten and an ace. Not great, but not complete shit either.

They’re evenly matched. Sylvain and Felix win two rounds in a row, but Glenn and Dimitri properly thrash them in the next three, once by luck and twice by Glenn outwitting them both. Felix has a competitive streak that far outweighs Sylvain or Dimitri’s, and the end of the game devolves into a weird, bastardized version of slapjack between the two brothers that Sylvain can’t wrap his head around.

Dimitri doesn’t seem to understand it, either, and eventually he turns his attention back to the flatscreen. Sylvain follows suit, feeling the kind of sleepy contentment that comes with long summer days well-spent, half dozing off. When Dimitri gets up to grab another bottle of water from the row of beverage fridges lining the opposite wall, Glenn intercepts him on his way back to his seat to pull him down, settling comfortably against his chest. Felix doesn’t seem to notice, far too absorbed in their game, even as Dimitri’s cheeks turn a bright, obvious pink.

Sylvain strokes his hand across Felix’s calf in his lap and idly wonders if he’ll _ever_ notice. 

Felix flings a card back at his brother, scowling. “No cheating.”

Glenn smirks, all smug confidence. “I wasn’t _cheating.”_

“Glenn, I _saw you–”_

They’re interrupted by the bright chime of Dimitri’s phone alarm going off. 

Dimitri looks up. “Glenn, did you take your meds?”

Glenn shrugs, clearly unbothered as he starts to climb out of Dimitri’s lap. “Nah. I’ll go get them.” 

Dimitri frowns. “I can go, it’s no trouble.”

“That’s alright.” Glenn puts his hand facedown on the table, fixing Felix with a dead-serious glare. “I’ll know if you cheat, little shit.”

Felix just rolls his eyes, carefully plucking a card from his hand to discard. The minute Glenn’s out of earshot, Felix looks over at Dimitri from over his cards. “Are you his _keeper_ now or something?”

Dimitri frowns. “What?”

“He’s an adult. He can take care of himself.”

Sylvain feels like he’s missing some key part of the puzzle, a glaring context-shaped hole that would explain the sudden shift in Felix’s mood. It’s such a specific thing to nitpick about – but then again, Felix _does_ tend to err on the side of particular, about everything from his training regimen to adding hot sauce to _everything_ he eats.

“I know that, Felix–”

“Then why do you baby him?”

It feels like an old, well-worn argument. Still, there’s a simmering level of old, leftover resentment that makes Sylvain feel like he’s just walked into a friend’s house and their family is too preoccupied arguing around the dinner table to notice him shifting uncomfortably in his seat, avoiding any and all eye contact.

“Felix, that’s not fair, you know his memory–”

Felix sneers. “Save it. I’m not in the mood for excuses.”

Now _that_ feels unnecessarily harsh, and Sylvain’s trying to figure out what he could do or say to smooth over the tension when Glenn returns. Felix goes back to studying his cards, his brow furrowing in concentration while Dimitri’s face melts into something unbearably soft as he welcomes Glenn back into his arms. It’s almost painful to watch – Dimitri’s blatant affection competing with Felix’s obstinate refusal to see it.

Glenn picks up his hand and scrutinizes his cards. He must determine that Felix didn’t cheat, because he asks, “another round?”

Felix slides the deck of cards across the table. “Sure. Your deal.”

As Sylvain watches them play, something hot and ugly curls in his gut. It takes him a moment to recognize it for what it is: _jealousy._ Over the fact that they can shelve aside their disagreement, at least for the night. Over their dynamic – because beneath all the teasing and shit-talking, there’s mutual trust, respect, _love._ It’sevident in the proud smile Glenn wore when Felix took the podium earlier today; it’s clear in the way Dimitri and Felix both fuss and dote over Glenn. Over the idea that not all arguments between brothers have to be relationship-ruining or world-ending.

Well. Not like Sylvain would know anything about that.

_I’ve had a few little love affairs  
They didn’t last very long and they’ve been pretty scarce  
I used to think I was sensible  
It makes the truth even more incomprehensible  
Cause everything is new  
And everything is you  
_ —

“What are your go-to songs?” Sylvain asks, leaning into Felix to be heard over the bubbly J-pop beat playing through the speakers. He flashes a wink at the bartender when she brings them their drinks – a mojito for himself and a vodka cranberry for Felix. 

Apparently, Annette was a planner – not only had she made dinner reservations for Friday, she’d booked one of the party rooms at a popular karaoke chain (featuring unlimited wings, which Sylvain suspects is part of the reason Felix even agreed in the first place, and all-you-can-drink deals until dawn). And now he has Felix cozied up next to him on a plush leather sofa, looking adorably pouty as Sylvain passes him his drink. 

“I’ve never sang karaoke,” Felix grumbles around his straw.

“What? Really?” Sylvain’s mojito tastes watered-down to the point where he’s questioning if there’s actually any alcohol in it, but he sucks it down all the same – the drinks _are_ bottomless, after all.

Felix shrugs. A look of subtle discomfort passes across his face as he looks away from Sylvain over to where Dimitri and Glenn are sitting with a small group of others: Dedue, the broad forward attacker on the lacrosse team who scored no less than eight points in their last game to clinch them a spot in quarterfinals; Ashe, the slight silver-haired gymnast who placed behind Felix earlier today; Annette and Ingrid.

They welcome him into their little group with warmth – Annette spends all of dinner chattering to him about the list of bakeries she wants to visit while she’s here, and Dedue graciously explains the finer points of lacrosse to him on the walk from the restaurant to the karaoke bar. Ingrid teased Felix mercilessly about finding a boyfriend – they’d agreed early on to limit the amount of people who knew the truth about their little ruse – while Sylvain cracked up and Dimitri looked on with a politely pained smile.

(Sylvain absolutely doesn’t deserve their kindness or friendship, but it isn’t hard to keep up their make-believe relationship, not when Felix keeps leaning into his side like he belongs there.)

“It’s not my thing.”

Sylvain nudges Felix with his shoulder, grin wide and teasing. He wants nothing more than to pepper kisses across his burning cheeks, if only because Felix always responds so beautifully, blushing hot and bright. “Have you ever _been_ to a karaoke bar?”

Felix’s scowl softens. “Yeah. Annette insists we go for her birthday every year.”

“And you’ve never sang a song for her? Not even for her birthday?”

Felix shakes his head, biting his lip. Sylvain sighs, just this side of overdramatic as he slips his free hand through Felix’s. It takes all of his willpower to ignore the way his heart flutters featherlight in his chest when Felix doesn’t immediately jerk away. “Oh my god. We’re going to change that tonight.”

The drinks keep coming, and after approximately one-and-a-half vodka Red Bulls, Annette’s the first to approach the stage. Felix and Sylvain get absorbed into the larger group after some ribbing from Ingrid _(are you two lovebirds gonna be gross in the corner all night or actually join the party?),_ thighs pressed together beneath the table as alcohol and conversation flows easily. Sylvain winds up talking to Dedue while Felix sits beside Annette as she pores through the song list, finally landing on the _perfect_ song to kick the night off with.

It’s an upbeat, foot-stomping anthem of a song Sylvain doesn’t recognize, but Annette belts each line with the voice of an angel, hitting the high notes with perfect clarity: _I wanna cut through the clouds, break the ceiling, I wanna dance on the roof, you and me alone, I wanna cut to the feeling, oh yeah._ She’s entrancing, her voice bright as she dances around the stage, barely looking at the lyrics scrolling on screen, glittery microphone in hand. _I want it all or nothing, no more in between, now give your everything to me, let’s get real baby._

Sylvain chances a glance at Felix, who’s just as entranced as the rest of their table, watching with rapt, starry-eyed attention. He thinks of the fact that he’s basically spent an entire two weeks by Felix’s side and hasn’t gotten sick of it – if anything, he finds himself missing Felix’s company when he’s at practice or watching events in Claude’s room. He’s caught himself texting Felix the cutest cat videos that pop up on his timeline, or simple, stupid _good luck_ texts before practice. He keeps telling himself it’s probably too much, he should probably pull back, but then Felix wakes him up with sleep-smeared kisses across his neck, or drags him into the sauna for a hasty handjob, and Sylvain finds himself feeling more smitten by the day.

By the _song,_ even. 

When it ends, Annette gives a little bow and skips casually offstage, like she hasn’t blown all of them out of the water. 

“Did you like it?” she asks as she slides back into the booth, cozying up next to Ingrid.

Sylvain whistles low, impressed. “I think I get why Felix hasn’t sang for you yet.” Felix turns to him with wide-eyed mortification. Sylvain grins back, wide and teasing. “He’s _intimidated.”_

“Am not,” Felix grumbles, even as everyone at the table erupts in laughter. It even pulls a little chuckle from perpetually stone-faced Glenn. Something shifts in Sylvain’s chest, the sense of belonging blooming there, loosened by alcohol and Felix blushing against his side.

Annette’s performance breaks the ice, helped along with the constant flow of drinks, and a queue forms. There’s a Kelly Clarkson song next – one Sylvain, Annette, and Ingrid all scream-sing along to as Felix rolls his eyes – and then someone half-yells a Blink-182 song. Mercedes, Annette’s friend and a bronze-medal weightlifter, orders a couple of rounds of shots for everyone, and it all goes downhill from there.

By the time someone starts singing the opening notes of _Hey Jude,_ Sylvain feels well beyond tipsy. The lights blur everything, turning the world rose-colored and fuzzy around the edges. Felix’s face swims into focus, his smile pleasantly hazy as he sings along to the chorus, and Sylvain realizes somewhere throughout the night Felix has scooted halfway on his lap, one arm looped around his shoulders for stability, his hand splayed across Felix’s thigh. When Felix dissolves into a loud, drunk laugh at the end of a particularly loud round of _na-na-na-nas,_ Sylvain ducks in for a brief kiss to the corner of his mouth. 

Sylvain’s eyes flick around the room, but Annette and Ingrid are too busy singing along and Dimitri and Glenn are so wrapped up in each other he’d be surprised if they’d notice anything if it happened right under their noses.Felix looks surprised, but it quickly morphs into something equal parts flustered and pleased, his blush burning scarlet under the flashing lights.

Dedue’s up singing something slow and sweet, his voice blossoming deep, rich honey among brassy trumpets: _strangers in the night, two lonely people, we were strangers in the night, up to the moment when we said our first hello, little did we know love was just a glance away, a warm embracing dance away,_ when Sylvain turns to Felix and nudges him gently.

“What should I sing?”

Felix shrugs, his hand tracing absentminded figures along Sylvain’s arm through his t-shirt sleeve. “I don’t know. Don’t you have a _go-to song?”_ Sylvain itches to kiss the smirk off of his face, and maybe if he had a few more mojitos in him he would, but he smiles instead, tapping Felix on the tip of his nose with one finger, delighted at the little scowl it earns him.

“I do, actually,” he shoots back, all tipsy confidence. Felix raises his eyebrow, and Sylvain knows a challenge when he sees one, which: _game on._ He waits until the last piano note sounds and Dedue steps down to an uproar of hoots and hollers to slide Felix out of his lap and into the booth. 

It doesn’t take long for Sylvain to find one of his favorites near the top of the alphabetical list on the song machine, and he selects it with a decisiveness he usually has to fake to feel, but the alcohol and Felix have him feeling so confident, so _good._ Time pulls and stretches in waves under the pink lights, and then the screen hanging from the ceiling flashes _[36 second intro]_ and Sylvain finds himself clutching the microphone, clearing his throat one last time. 

“Oh, I _love_ ABBA,” Sylvain can hear Annette exclaim from somewhere in the room, but his gaze is focused completely on Felix as the opening synth strikes up. 

“I wasn’t jealous before we met, now every woman I see is a potential threat.” Sylvain falls easily into the first verse, finding his rhythm. It’s been awhile – a few years, at least, since his last actual karaoke outing – but he sings plenty in the shower, so same thing, right? “And I’m possessive, it isn’t nice. You’ve heard me saying that smoking was my only vice.”

Felix flushes from across the room, his face bright from a mix of alcohol and clear embarrassment as Sylvain hops the two short steps down to the table, locked on him like a target, only breaking eye contact at the very last minute to turn to Annette. 

“But now it isn’t true,” he croons, reaching out to her, and she shriek-giggles as he presses a brief kiss to the back of her hand, “now everything is new,” he blows Ingrid a kiss next, “and all I’ve learned has overturned, I beg of you–”

And now Sylvain turns back to Felix, looking hopelessly embarrassed, and slides his free hand under his jaw, cradling his cheek, hot beneath his palm.

“Don’t go wasting your emotion,” he sings, low and smooth, ignoring the drunk laughter pressing in on them, because everything ceases to exist in that moment except for Felix, and Sylvain, and Sylvain and Felix. He looks so kissable like this, the lush peaks of his lips parted, the contours of his cheeks highlighted in that pretty pink blush under the dim light, waving in the heat and alcohol-haze between their bodies. Sylvain can’t help but thumb Felix’s chin up, fingers scheming reunion to lean in closer, closer, bound by gravity and sweetness–

“Lay all your love on me.”


	5. Chapter 5

_I'll be your quiet afternoon crush  
Be your violent overnight rush  
Make you crazy over my touch  
_ —

Sylvain wakes up the next morning to a face full of long, dark hair.

“Mmph,” he grunts, squirming out from under Felix’s weight where he’s got him pinned, hot and sweaty against the mattress. Felix, for his part, barely moves, only shifts back closer to Sylvain once he’s properly extricated himself, slinging an arm across his bare chest.

Last night comes to him in bits and pieces as he stares up at the ceiling. He remembers screaming himself hoarse, sandwiched between Annette and Felix as Ingrid belted his favorite Taylor song – _you said it was a great love, one for the ages, but if the story’s over, why am I still writing pages?_ He remembers planting a fond kiss on both Dimitri and Glenn’s foreheads, sending them off with a knowing wink as they slid into their cab.

He remembers Felix, golden in the streetlight on the way home, stumbling against him with loud laughter; Felix, downing vodka-cranberries, radiant in the alcohol glow; Felix, drunk and dramatic, cartwheeling down the hallway with scary precision until Sylvain had pressed him up against the door to his room with a dozen sloppy kisses smeared across his neck.

They’d been too drunk to mess around (though that hadn’t stopped Felix from trying, valiantly jerking both of them off together until they’d both dissolved into laughter over both of their persistent whiskey-dick), so they’d stayed up and talked instead. Felix had been so warm, curled in his lap wearing an oversized pair of Sylvain’s shorts, his head resting easy against Sylvain’s shoulder. Sylvain had kept his hands busy playing with Felix’s undone hair, braiding it back into messy loops as the TV played a muted rerun of the women’s butterfly finals earlier that day.

He barely remembers what they talked about. Felix’s performance, for sure – how good it’d felt standing up on the podium, like he’d finally earned something worthwhile for once in his life. Annette and Ingrid, and whether or not they were going to _finally_ get together or not after their match on Saturday. Sylvain’s fall from disgraced, disowned heir to professional athlete and Olympic sweetheart. His dad, probably. Glenn. He’d gotten distracted around the time they circled back to the topic of Felix’s other friends, sleepy and drunk and too busy lining the constellation of moles on Felix’s neck with kisses to pay close attention to the story he’d been telling – something about when Ingrid was twelve and chipped her tooth playing lacrosse.

Nausea hits him all at once, because Sylvain doesn’t _do_ things like that with anyone, let alone someone he’s _fake dating_ for good press and the promise of a sponsorship.

_(Is that really all there is to it?_ a mean little voice inside his head asks, cruel and teasing.

He tells his brain to shut the fuck up.)

When he turns to roll out of bed to track down his phone, his hangover doubles down, hitting him like a fucking truck. It’s only then he remembers the last time he was _drunk-_ drunk like this was probably two and a half years ago at the annual Gautier holiday party – the same one that had gotten him kicked out of the family for good.

“Fuck,” he swears under his breath.

Felix grunts next to him in agreement. He looks impossibly cute like this, made clingy and sweet by sleep. Sylvain forgoes finding his phone to lean back in, brushing Felix’s bangs out of his eyes. His hair is silky from where Sylvain combed through it with his fingers last night.

He doesn’t know how long he lies there, lulled back to sleep by Felix’s soft snores, but when he wakes up again it’s to the sun streaming through the windows at a perfect slant to blind him. Felix stirs, halfway on top of him again, nudging his nose into his neck. Sylvain can feel the gossamer whisper of dark lashes against his skin as he blinks himself awake.

“Hi, sleepyhead.”

Felix groans, grabby hands tugging the covers up under his chin as he burrows in closer. Sylvain starts to laugh, but his headache comes back full force almost immediately. He digs the heel of his hand into his eye, a pitiful attempt at relieving the pressure there. A quick glance at the bedside table confirms what he suspected: an empty bottle of sake and no water in sight.

“How are you feeling?” Sylvain asks. The weight of Felix against his chest feels good. Grounding, even.

“Terrible,” comes Felix’s response, muffled against his neck.

Sylvain hums in agreement. He briefly entertains the thought of some quick morning fun – he’s been meaning to eat Felix out again, ever since their locker room hookup – but overrules himself in favor of _water_ and _coffee_ and, maybe most importantly, _shower._ Dorothea booked them their first “couple” interview today, a quirky twenty-questions video with Buzzfeed. A brief glance at the clock above the TV tells Sylvain that they should probably get going soon, even though he’d love nothing more than to spread Felix out between the sheets and ride him slow and deep for an hour (or three).

“We should probably get up.”

Felix grunts, and the hand curled in Sylvains hair tightens, holding him there just long enough to suck a bruising kiss into his neck, teeth tugging gently on his earlobe. _Feeeeelix,_ Sylvain whines when he bites down harder, cock twitching in his boxers.

“If we shower now, we might have some spare time after,” Sylvain murmurs, reluctantly untangling himself from a very pouty Felix. He turns to watch Felix blink the sleep from his eyes, rubbing them with the back of his hand.

“Fuck,” he mutters. “Can’t see shit.”

Sylvain reaches to flick through his phone. There’s a handful of voicemails from Dorothea, a couple dozen Twitter notifications, and four texts from an unknown number:

_1:33AM: hi!!!!! :)  
1:35AM: it ’s anneTTE   
3:52AM: wher e   
3:53AM: did u and feeelix gO_

“What?”

Felix blinks, still rubbing one eye. He looks adorable, in a sleepy cat sort of way. “I wore contacts yesterday,” he explains. “I must have taken them out last night.”

“Oh.” Sylvain puts his phone down. _Shower and breakfast first, deal with whatever Dorothea needs later._ Felix squints over at him, and Sylvain feels his chest go warm, tingly around the edges. “Want me to go get them? I could grab breakfast too.”

Felix groans in relief and promptly drops back into bed, rubbing the side of his head. _“Please._ Keys are in my wallet. Glasses are by the sink,” he mumbles from under the covers when Sylvain’s finally tugged on a fresh pair of running shorts and a t-shirt. He fishes the slim black leather fold from the pockets of Felix’s jeans from yesterday; two electronic keycards peek out of the front where they’re stuffed in behind a credit card.

“You’re 6071?”

Another grunt.

The lights in the hallway are too bright. It immediately makes him regret not slapping a baseball hat or sunglasses or _something_ on before embarking on this errand. Felix’s room is close, though, just a handful of doors down on the opposite side of the hall. He remembers it less by number and more its proximity to the elevators – was it five or six doors down? Sylvain frowns, squinting at the keycards in Felix’s wallet, but they’re blank, giving no indication of which door is the right one. He takes a chance on the one to the left and the key reader, mercifully, flashes green.

It takes about thirty seconds before Sylvain realizes this isn’t Felix’s room. There’s a lacrosse stick leaning up against the closet door, and he almost trips over a helmet in the entryway, and he’s _just_ about to turn around and try the door on the right when he hears it.

_It,_ in this case, being the unmistakable sounds of someone getting _fucked._

“Fuck, _oh,_ Dima, right there, love–”

Sylvain stops dead. He considers just turning around and _not_ leaning to the side to peek around the corner – he really does – but curiosity and the sound of skin-on-skin wins out.

What he’s greeted with is Glenn, perched in Dimitri’s lap, completely naked.

They’re obviously fucking. There’s no doubt about that, and that’s not really what phases Sylvain (aside from the whole seeing-Felix’s-brother’s-dick thing). No, what freezes him in place is the sheer intimacy, the obvious _tenderness,_ the love and affection being shared between them. Glenn is facing the door, riding Dimitri with obvious pleasure, his head tilted back to lull against Dimitri’s shoulder. His eyes slit open at Sylvain’s intrusion, but he doesn’t seem bothered to see him – if anything he tips his head further, leaning deeply into Dimitri’s touch as one hand comes up to _shush_ Sylvain before flicking his hand towards the door, a clear dismissal. Dimitri, fortunately, doesn’t notice any of this, his attention focused solely on Glenn, teething marks into the juncture of his slim, pretty neck.

When Sylvain closes the door behind him fifteen seconds later, he feels like maybe he’s still a little drunk. Or dreaming. Or both.

—

The waves of shock still haven’t faded when Sylvain finally stumbles back to his room, laden down with glasses, a clean pair of Felix’s clothes he’d fished out of an empty duffel bag, and a heavy bag of takeout boxes and drinks he’d picked up from the cafeteria two floors down.

Felix’s voice, still rough with sleep, greets him, shaking him out of the daze he’s been in for the past half an hour. “Did you get bacon?”

“Yeah,” Sylvain answers back automatically. He doesn’t remember if he added bacon or not.

“Thank fuck, I’m _starving–”_

“Felix,” he interrupts, dropping the bag on the little table in the corner. He’s thought of a hundred different tactful ways to word the question, but he just winds up asking: “Did you know your brother and Dimitri are fucking?”

This, of all things, gets a loud snort out of Felix. He rolls over in bed towards Sylvain, an amused expression playing across his face. “Ha. Very funny. Dimitri used to have _such_ a huge crush on Glenn, you wouldn’t believe it.”

_Oh, I would. I really, really would._

Sylvain swallows and tries again. “No, I meant that I _saw them,”_ he starts to protest, but Felix is too busy picking through the first takeout box to pay attention, groaning appreciatively at the pile of bacon Sylvain had apparently piled on top of a generous helping of eggs and thick-cut buttered toast. He’s too distracted by how cute Felix looks in glasses to chide him for taking the box of food back to bed, perched on a pillow with his legs crossed, hair pulled up into a haphazard bun.

“What?” Felix finally asks once he’s devoured the bacon, reaching for the bottle of water Sylvain already half-chugged in an effort to get rid of his persistent headache.

And in a flash of hungover clarity, he remembers: Felix, leaning against his chest last night. Felix, talking about Glenn, talking about his accident, talking about _Dimitri,_ how he’d been the one who threw the shot that knocked him unconscious for four days. Felix, not knowing whether his brother would wake up or not; helping with his recovery as he slept for six months straight, only waking to eat and take his medication. Felix, watching Dimitri fall apart, wracked with guilt, over his brother’s bedside.

He remembers Felix’s voice, how it’d cracked when he said _I still haven’t forgiven him._

“What?” Felix asks, more impatient this time. “You were saying something.”

Sylvain shakes his head, reaching for the container of fruit he’d gotten himself. “It’s nothing.” Felix wrinkles his nose as he leans in to feed him a cut strawberry, teeth nipping at the edges of his fingers. “C’mon, let’s shower. Wouldn’t want to be late for our interview.”

_Lightning in your eyes, you can't speak  
Falling from the sky, down to me  
I see it in your face, I'm relief  
_ —

“Okay, great! Sylvain, you sit here, and Felix– yep, that’s _perfect!_ Raph, how does that look?”

Hilda Valentine is just as sweet-and-sour in real life as she is in the Buzzfeed videos she hosts, bubblegum-pink betrayed by a sharp tongue and a penchant for sniffing out drama. Raphael, her burly cameraman, gives a cheerful thumbs up after he adjusts his over-ear headphones.

“Aw, you two are just _adorable,”_ she trills, flitting back and forth between the set and the camera a couple more times. They’re at the official Media Press Center of the Olympics – a massive tower right on Tokyo Bay, composed of four inverted pyramids and filled with a dizzying array of conference rooms. Upon their arrival, Hilda had greeted them with a strawberry pink boba tea that matched the exact shade of her hair perfectly and hustled them straight to the third floor. She explained that _they_ would actually be the ones interviewing each other, using a set of prewritten questions.

_It’s more interesting that way,_ she’d said, smirking at the sight of Felix’s clammy hand laced through Sylvain’s. _Our viewers want to hear from you, not me!_

Sylvain’s never really suffered from stage fright. Whether it’s on the diving block or in interviews, his practiced charm and lazy smiles have always come in handy, the safety-net of being able to deflect with a flirty joke or cheeky wink a comforting thing.

He can’t say the same for Felix, who’s sitting next to him on the low sofa, his jaw tight, his limbs stiff. Sylvain nudges his shoulder, leaning in to grace a kiss against his cheek. “Relax, okay? It’ll be over before you know it.”

They’d agreed – in the cab on their way over, FaceTiming Dorothea – that the best course of action would be to tell the truth as much as they could, and when that wasn’t possible, to let Sylvain take over. It wouldn’t take a genius to see through an elaborately concocted story of false romance and love.

All Felix had to do, Dorothea explained, was at least _pretend_ like he liked Sylvain.

It didn’t seem like that would be too difficult, if Sylvain was being perfectly honest (and a little cocky). He’d seen the most recent pictures – nothing scandalous this time, thankfully – but Felix was selling their relationship almost alarmingly well. Felix’s face scrunched up in laughter as they watched a parade of street performers, Sylvain’s arm looped around him. Felix’s lips pressed to Sylvain’s cheek as they sat in the lacrosse stadium stands during one of Dimitri’s matches (that one got _great_ engagement, according to Dorothea).

There's the possibility that Felix is just way better at faking it than he’d originally thought, but Sylvain doubts that this is the case – he’s spent enough time with Felix to get a pretty good read on him. He’s quick to scowl and point out things he doesn’t like, but he’s also quick to laugh and smile, too. As much as he’s probably loath to admit it, Felix isn’t particularly good at hiding his emotions, and so the _other_ possibility – that Felix truly does like him – is probably more likely, and about a hundred times more terrifying.

_No strings attached,_ he’d promised.

Because anything else would mean commitment, would mean real feelings, would mean Sylvain peeling back everything to show Felix his ugly, jealous heart. It turns his stomach and fills it with anxious butterflies all at once.

The red camera light blips and Raphael starts a countdown with his fingers. At _one,_ Hilda flashes a dazzling white smile at the camera and begins.

“Hiya Buzzfeed, Hilda Valentine here! I’m joined today by the hottest couple of the Summer Olympics – gymnast Felix Fraldarius and swimmer Sylvain Gautier! Welcome to the show, guys.”

Sylvain grins brightly. From the corner of his eye, Felix’s blush somehow doubles in intensity. “Hi, Hilda. Thanks for having us.”

“And we are _so_ excited to have you on. And Sylvain, I was so bummed that you didn’t mention _anything_ about your new boo during our interview at the beginning of the games.”

“You know, Hilda,” Sylvain leans in conspiratorially, like he’s got the juiciest gossip in the world. _Oh, if only she knew._ “I didn’t want to jinx it by spilling the secret too early.”

Hilda laughs, swatting playfully at his arm. “You certainly haven’t seemed shy about it the last few weeks!”

Sylvain knows this is where the camera will pan out; where photos of them kissing and holding hands all over Tokyo will be post-edited in, flashing one after the other across the screen.

“Yeah, guess not,” Felix chimes in, half-sarcastic, which gleans another bubbly laugh out of Hilda. Sylvain squeezes his hand reassuringly. They can do this – Sylvain can play the handsome, charismatic boyfriend to Felix’s sharp acidity. They can _totally_ do this.

“Well, today we’re going to play a little game called _Buzzfeed’s Couple Interview._ You’ll each take turns asking each other questions–” Hilda nods to the two stacks of glossy notecards in front of them on the coffee table, “–so we can get to know you a little better! Any questions?”

“Nope!” Sylvain says. Felix shakes his head.

“Great!” Hilda beams. “Let’s get started. Felix, you first.”

Felix reaches for his stack of cards. Sylvain lets his hand go long enough to scoot to the other side of the small sofa, shielding the cards from his view as he flips one over and crosses his legs. He reads it and frowns before looking up at Sylvain.

“Where did we first meet, and what did I think of you?”

Thank _fucking_ god this is Sylvain’s question to answer. He dials the charm up to ten and smiles at Felix as he reaches his hand out to stroke over his folded knee. “We met… at a rooftop party.”

It’s technically not a lie, not really – the question never mentioned _when_ they met. Memories of that night bloom in his mind: the electric spark of their arms brushing, the almost-kiss, how Felix snorted when Sylvain asked him to dance.

Felix watches him carefully, his thumbs fidgeting at the edge of the notecard. “And you couldn’t keep your eyes off of me. It was pretty cute, actually, how _insatiable–”_

Felix smacks his hand away. He’s scowling, but the blush that’s spread to the tips of his ears says it all. “One point,” he mutters at Hilda, shuffling the card to the back of the deck. She marks it down with a tally on a little whiteboard that says _Sylvain – 1, Felix – 0._ “Next question.”

Sylvain clears his throat and flips his first card over. It’s an easy one for Felix to fake, thankfully. “What is my guilty pleasure?” Felix smirks at him, looking one-hundred percent confident as he unfolds his legs, tosses his feet into Sylvain’s lap, and says, “Ice cream.”

He masks the frown of disbelief that crosses his face at the sheer luck of Felix getting it right, or at the very least _not wrong,_ stroking one hand over the exposed sliver of skin on Felix’s ankle peeking out between the hem of his joggers and his trainers. “Sure – I would have also accepted _Say Yes To the Dress_ or McDonald’s.”

_Sylvain – 1, Felix – 1._

It’s almost fun, after awhile. They rack up a truly astonishing amount of points between the two of them, and Sylvain marvels at all of the little things that Felix has apparently picked up on in their two weeks “together” – how he prefers sweet over spicy, how he’s more of a neat freak than a slob. Sylvain teases him, scoring easy points along the way that Felix can’t possibly say no to: _what’s my go-to-song at karaoke?_ Felix had asked through a smirk, to which Sylvain had replied _trick question, you don’t have one._

Felix starts getting competitive about halfway through, once he forgets the cameras and realizes that this is just a _game_ more than anything. That streak of ambition and drive to win rears up and he starts to give as good as he gets, looking increasingly distracting as his blush permeates his skin, splotchy and flustered across his neck and chest.

“What sport do I like to watch the most?” Sylvain asks, reading off the second-to-last card in his deck. An amused grin curls across Felix’s face, and in that moment Sylvain wants nothing more than to kiss it off of him.

“Gymnastics,” Felix deadpans. Hilda laughs.

“I don’t know if I can give him a point for that,” Sylvain points out, though he can’t help but smile when Felix nudges him playfully, pressing a foot into his side. (He’s not exactly _wrong,_ not when he’s popped a boner at least once watching Felix cartwheel back handsprings across the floor during practice.)

It’s going well. _Really_ well. Sylvain thinks they should probably get an award at the end of this, or at the very least a present from Dorothea, or _something,_ because they’re absolutely selling this. And the thing is, it’s _easy,_ stroking along Felix’s ankle, joking and laughing with him, fibbing their way through half of the questions. So, yeah, it’s going great, until–

“What sport did–” Felix’s voice wavers for the first time, threatening to crack. He looks up at Sylvain, a thread of disbelief and fury laced in his voice. Sylvain can feel how his body goes all tense, can see the white-knuckled grip of Felix clutching the very last card. “What sport did I grow up playing with my brother before he was injured?”

He could lie. He could spin something up, perfectly playful and teasing. He could gloss over the question entirely and pull Felix into a camera-worthy kiss, all passion and tongue. He _could_ lie, but the flicker of uncertainty in Felix’s eyes has him blanking on the spot. But looking at Felix, his heart feels too big for his body, soft and twisty and bubbling over in his chest.

“Lacrosse,” Sylvain says quietly.

Hilda marks a point down on the board. When she cheerfully announces the final score _(Sylvain – 16, Felix – 12),_ it doesn’t feel like winning.

—

Felix doesn’t say a word the entire ride home, looking distant and spaced-out as they speed through Tokyo in the Uber that Hilda called to take them back to the village. Sylvain, in turn, doesn’t ask questions – not when Felix wordlessly reaches for his hand across the backseat to twine their fingers together; not when Felix follows him down the hall to his room, walking right past his own door as he quietly leans into Sylvain’s side.

His kisses taste desperate; his fingers scrabble at Sylvain’s seams until they’re both breathless. Sylvain searches for the right words as Felix slips his tongue past his teeth and he mashes their foreheads together. _Are you okay? Do you want to talk about it? What can I do?_ They all feel so meager, so not-enough, especially when Felix is busy pushing off all their clothes and nipping his teeth along the line of Sylvain’s lip.

It’s easy to let it happen – to let his mind blank out, to let Felix push him back on his bed and climb on top of him, licking and biting his way down his body. All of his wound-up, nervous energy from the interview coalesces into jittery fingers and a roughness that’s both devastatingly hot and a little heartbreaking, especially when Sylvain can _feel_ the frustration rising, thrumming beneath Felix’s skin. He soothes his palms down Felix’s sides, an attempt at softening out his sharp edges as he admires the ripple of muscle beneath skin.

And although it goes against all of Sylvain’s instincts, he wants so badly to slow things down – to soothe Felix with gentle kisses and languid touches, to hold him against his chest like last night without the haze of alcohol to muddy their thoughts and loosen their tongues. He wants to coax out his thoughts and untangle his upset, wants to sit and listen while Felix talks it out.

With a jolt, Sylvain realizes that what he wants is closeness. Intimacy. _Trust._

But then Felix is tugging at his half-hard cock, sloppy and fever-hot as he smears his palm down the head and back. Sylvain gasps, all coherent thought temporarily lost as Felix licks into his mouth again. Felix’s movements get messier, jamming two of his own fingers into his mouth artlessly before lifting himself up on his knees to reach back towards his hole. When Felix finally tips his head down to lean against Sylvain’s chest on an exhale, he’s shaking with need.

“Hey.” Sylvain draws his palms across Felix’s back and sides, rubbing circles there as he nuzzles into his hair. It’s still pulled up in the perfectly mussed bun Felix had styled it into for the interview. “Hey. Tell me what you need.”

Felix whines. It’s a vulnerable sound, one that slips straight through to Sylvain’s heart. He waits, hands pausing in their path down when it becomes clear that Felix doesn’t want to answer. “Sweetheart,” he murmurs, the pet name slipping unbidden from his lips. The fact that Felix doesn’t fight it – just burrows his head further into Sylvain’s chest – shows just how far gone he is. “We don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to,” Sylvain offers. Even though all he really wants is to understand, tonight isn’t about him. “But if I don’t know what you want, I’m not going to be able to give it to you.”

Felix whines again, rocking his hips back, searching for friction. When he lifts his head up to peer up at Sylvain, there’s a glimmer of wetness in the corners of his eyes.

“Fuck me,” Felix whispers into the freckles on his chest, “please.”

“Okay.” Sylvain pets down the line of his cheek, his heart threatening to burst from his chest at Felix’s fragile vulnerability. “Okay, yeah. I can do that. I’ll take care of you.”

Sylvain’s true to his word. He opens Felix up around the unyielding width of his fingers, stretching him easily. He sucks bruising kisses into the skin of his neck, into the tops of his shoulders and around each sensitive nipple. He puts his thighs to work fucking Felix into the mattress, not stopping even when Felix comes with a low, wet cry, dripping across the sheets. He hitches up Felix’s hips when they start to fall, fueled by his cries of _yes_ and _right there_ and _please, m-more, please,_ fucking him straight through his second orgasm until he’s a crying, drooling mess against the sheets.

In other words, he’s the perfect warm body to distract Felix from his thoughts.

When clarity hits somewhere after the third time he’s made Felix come and Sylvain remembers that he has a race tomorrow and he probably shouldn’t be sore from a night of marathon-fucking, he pulls out and settles himself in between Felix’s legs. He teases Felix with featherlight touches until he’s shaking, plays with his swollen, pert nipples until they start to chafe, and when he finally wraps his lips around the head of Felix’s cock he comes easy, collapsing back into the sheets in boneless, fucked-out satisfaction.

It doesn’t take long for Felix to fall asleep – a few minutes, at most. Sylvain’s heart goes soft and twisty, feeling too big for his chest as Felix stirs and shifts on the bed when he starts to gently wipe down his belly and thighs with a wet, warm washcloth. He looks peaceful like this, all the stress and worry fucked out of him.

Hollow satisfaction fills the void in Sylvain’s chest – at the fact that _he_ was the one to turn Felix into a fucked-out mess, that _he_ was the one to make him forget about the interview with touch and tongue alone. It isn’t much, but maybe it’s enough that he took care of Felix like he said he would, fucked him through the worst of it right into the oblivion of restful sleep.

The sun is setting through the slats of the blinds, sinking down beyond the city skyline to wrap Felix up in striped sherbert-salmon when Sylvain finally gets up to flip off the lights. He pauses on his way back to bed to brush the bangs from Felix’s eyes, a hidden act of tenderness lost to the sound of the air conditioner filling the room with pink noise.

He’s settled in on the other side of the bed when he hears it – or, more accurately, feels it against his skin, Felix’s lips moving in lazy sleepwave patterns across his spine, his arm shifting around Sylvain’s hips, fingers brushing affection into the shallow valleys between his ribs.

“Thank you,” Felix sighs.


	6. Chapter 6

_I’m underwater, no air in my lungs  
My eyes are open, I’m done giving up  
You are the wave I could never tame  
If I survive I’ll dive back in  
_ —

“So,” Claude snaps his swim cap on over perfectly mussed hair, tucking his single braid back. “How’s _loverboy?”_

Sylvain grimaces at the unfortunate nickname Claude’s chosen to bestow upon Felix. Out of everyone on the team, he’s both the best and the worst person to know about their situation. He laughed for about seven humiliating minutes straight when Sylvain told him about their plan for good press and sponsorships, but after that, Claude’s been nothing but wholly supportive of _the biggest Olympic scandal since ’94_ (Sylvain _really_ wishes he would stop calling it that). 

Sylvain sighs, tweaking his goggles where they’re pushed up on his forehead. “He’s good.”

They have one of the practice pools to themselves tonight. Low light filters in from the skylights lining the ceiling, casting golden sunset shadows over row after row of empty benches. The water stretches before them, ripples petering out in wide pools around where they tread water in side-by-side lanes. 

Claude snorts, throwing him a kickboard. “Gone on any fun dates lately? I’ve barely seen you.”

“You know we aren’t actually dating, right?” Sylvain loops his arms around the curved foam and pushes off from the wall. It’s one of his favorite ways to warm up for a workout – catching up with Claude (and, more often than not, bitching over one thing or another) while they swim lazy laps up and down the length of the pool. He doesn’t bother pointing out that the reason they’ve barely seen each other is because Claude’s been busy spending time with Marianne, who flew in a few days ago to watch his final races.

“Aren’t you?” Claude tilts his head. He has that look on his face, the one Sylvain knows too well – a bright gleam in his eye, like he _knows_ something’s up.

And, yeah, they _aren’t_ dating – but something’s shifted since the night after the interview. They don’t fuck everytime they see each other anymore. Sometimes Felix drags him out of the village and into Tokyo proper, where they eat their way through every yokocho they walk by. Sometimes they curl up in Sylvain’s bed and watch reruns of earlier events. When they get bored of that, they flip through channel after channel of scripted game shows and reality reruns until they fall asleep to the static, muted glow of the TV.

But more often than not, they talk. Felix tells him about how practice went, or how Ingrid and Annette are faring in their doubles matches. Felix talks about Glenn’s cat (Meatball, or Mimi for short, who also stars as his phone background), and all the other things he misses back home (the coffee, mainly). 

And for once, Sylvain finds himself listening. 

They make the first turn, pushing off the opposite wall.

“...No.” Sylvain wishes he sounded firmer, more confident in his answer.

“Huh.” Claude’s grinning now, bright and handsome and far too acute. “Could’ve fooled me.”

Sylvain focuses on his kicks, making them as long and fluid as possible. Claude keeps pace easily despite the centimetres Sylvain has on him, making up what he lacks in height with sheer stamina and drive.

“Do you _want_ to date him?” Claude asks. 

Sylvain frowns. Sure, he enjoys spending time with him, and not just the nights they fuck. Being stuck by his side has made the ordeal of coming here with no family or friends (aside from his teammates) _much_ more interesting. And he likes waking up to Felix’s breath hot against the back of his neck, likes the way Felix’s body bends beneath his own, infinitely flexible. He likes Felix’s hand encompassed in his, and the way Felix blushes whenever they find each other’s eyes across a stadium. He even liked the last night they spent together, in a way that he doesn’t quite understand – taking Felix apart and giving him what he needed, a perfect distraction from his unwanted thoughts.

“I don’t know.” It’s a lie, and they both know it.

“Well,” Claude leans onto his side, kicking lazily. “As my dearest friend _and_ future best man–” 

Sylvain snorts at this, inhaling a little pool water. He’s seen the ring Claude packed, wrapped up in a pair of socks at the bottom of his duffel, tanzanite and diamonds laced with delicate rose-gold vines, a perfect complement to Marianne’s hair.

“–I think you _do_ know,” he finishes.

Sylvain focuses on his breathing, letting the water lap up to his chin as he rests his head on the edge of the kickboard. “Yeah,” he finally says, because he’s never been able to hide anything from Claude.

He’s currently looking at him with a soft, sympathetic smile that Sylvain can’t stand. “Sylvie, you caught _feelings,_ didn’t you?” Claude’s lips curl up with amused laughter, but it’s more _you-poor-bastard_ than malicious.

They make another turn. Sylvain chews on his lip.

“How did you know?” he finally asks. “With Marianne?”

Claude looks thoughtful. “Well, we were friends first – that made it easier. At some point, I realized we were hanging out more often than we weren’t. And it was easy to talk to her, to open up.” He shrugs, as much as one can while holding onto a kickboard. “It doesn’t always need to be a big, complicated thing. Sometimes it just… works.”

_Sometimes it just works._ Sylvain thinks about all the hours he’s spent with Felix, how he’s enjoyed nearly every one. How the possibility of something simple seems so out of reach, since their whole _relationship,_ if it could be called that, was started on an elaborate lie to cover their asses. How Sylvain doesn’t even really care about that anymore – how he’s not sure if he ever did. 

Sylvain nods mutely. Claude catches the expression on his face and laughs, startlingly loud as it echoes off the water’s surface. “You’re freaking out right now, aren’t you? You like him.”

“Yeah.” Sylvain sighs. “I don’t know. Maybe. Yes.”

The way Claude looks at him, amused and sympathetic, somehow doesn’t make him feel any better. 

“It’s alright, you know? To feel something for him.” Claude arches an eyebrow. “Think of it this way – you’ve already got the PDA part down perfectly,” he teases, referring to the dozens of photos of them circulating the internet, headlining articles, showing up in clickbaity slideshows. “And you two get along, yeah?”

“Yeah.”

They both pause at the pool’s edge, sliding their kick boards onto land. Sylvain clings on with his fingertips, letting his body float out into the water, filling his lungs with air. 

“Here’s my advice: don’t overthink it,” Claude says as he snaps his goggles on. “I can tell you’re getting too in your head about this. You can’t assume you’ll fuck it up before you even try.” 

Claude’s words ring hollow in his chest as he pushes off against the wall, letting the water take him. 

—

The next day, Sylvain earns his first Olympic medal.

He’s never felt more out of his body as he does climbing out of the pool after swimming the 200-metre butterfly and looking up to see his name second on the electronic board, right beneath Ferdinand’s. The silver disc is light around his neck when he bends low to accept it and steps up to the podium, swathed in the French flag and laden with an embarrassing number of bouquets, courtesy of Claude.

Afterward, Felix flips off the cameras with a smile on his way to the locker room. 

(The press have a fucking _heyday_ with that one.)

Felix takes him out to dinner a few nights later – or rather, Felix and Dimitri and Glenn take him out to dinner. _To celebrate,_ Felix had muttered through a crimson blush when Sylvain asked the occasion. Dimitri found the restaurant, a casual sushi spot diligently hand-picked off the first page of Yelp in the heart of Ginza. 

There’s almost a double-date sort of vibe happening, with Dimitri’s arm snug around Glenn’s side as they wait for their table. Sylvain catches Felix’s hand rubbing circles over his thigh as they pick items at random off the menu (without fault, Felix always points to the items that have at least three little flame icons next to them). 

It’s chill and relaxed, exactly what he needs after going drinking last night with the rest of the men’s team. After spending nearly three weeks together, Sylvain feels almost comfortable in their little group. Him and Dimitri get along well (even if Felix doesn’t), and he could almost swear Glenn’s started to warm up to him, even tossing him a rare smile on occasion. It’s not a feeling he’s used to – back home he has a few friends, nothing that even closely resembles the tight-knit group they have – but it’s not unwelcome, either.

Their plates are mostly cleared – Dimitri’s still picking at an unagi roll – and Felix is leaning into his side, listless and full, when Sylvain’s phone lights up on the table.

[Dorothea 😘 ] : _nice job!!! u nailed it  
_[Dorothea 😘 ] : _[attached link]_

“Hey, the interview’s out.” 

Glenn and Dimitri look over from the other side of the table, intrigued. Sylvain taps on the thumbnail: _Olympic Couple Sylvain Gautier and Felix Fraldarius Ask Each Other 20 Questions | Buzzfeed Sports Interview_

It’s only ten minutes when it’s all edited down. Watching the first nine-and-a-half of them, Sylvain keeps getting distracted by the look on his own face. It’s a shy, honest affection he rarely ever sees, especially on himself.

Dimitri looks up in earnest awe when the video finally ends, cutting away to Hilda advertising more from her Olympic interview series. “I didn’t realize you were such a good actor, Sylvain! I will say, you two are incredibly believable as a couple.”

Sylvain’s trying to figure out whether he should accept this as a compliment or not when Glenn interrupts, frowning as he passes Sylvain’s phone back across the table. “She didn’t even _ask_ about your medal,” he comments, looking at Felix.

_Huh._ Sylvain hadn’t actually realized, to be perfectly honest. At the end, he’d been more concerned about getting Felix out of there as soon as possible than perfecting their sign offs and goodbyes. Despite all the hoping he’d been doing over the past two days, they didn’t edit out the last question, the one that made both of them visibly clam up before Sylvain stuttered out _lacrosse._ He turns to look at Felix – his lips are curling into a frown, an uncanny replica of his brother’s.

“Well, it wouldn’t be the _first_ time the press has made it all about lacrosse,” Felix mutters, petulant.

Glenn furrows his brow. “What do you mean?”

Sylvain can sense an argument coming on from a mile away. He’s spent enough time hanging out with the two of them over the past few weeks to realize it’s probably better to stay out of it, so he scans the dim-lit room for their waiter as he finishes off the rest of his Sapporo. When he turns back to the table, fresh beer in hand, Felix looks flushed all across his cheeks as Glenn continues explaining something with his typical blunt candor:

“You _did_ used to play Felix, I think it’s a fair question–”

Felix snorts, sarcastic and a little mean. “Yeah, a _totally_ fair question,” he says under his breath. Sylvain rubs a palm up and down Felix’s thigh. It doesn’t do anything to visibly soothe his rising temper, but he doesn’t move to push it off, either.

“Now, Felix,” Dimitri makes the mistake of piling in, a misguided attempt at smoothing over the situation. “I think Glenn does have a point–” 

“Stop it, will you? I didn’t ask for your opinion,” Felix snaps, rolling his eyes.

Dimitri immediately looks like he regrets saying anything. His gaze swivels between Felix (fuming) and Glenn (somewhat less fuming, but the way his arms are crossed tight across his chest says more than Sylvain’s seen him verbalize in weeks), helpless. “Felix, I’m really just trying to–”

“–Help?” Felix finishes for him. “That’s rich, coming from you–”

Glenn finally speaks up, right as Sylvain’s trying to figure out if there’s anything he could possibly say that would soothe the palpable tension emanating from everyone at the table. “Stop it, okay?” Everyone’s eyes snap to him. It’s almost absurd, how such a small person can command attention so easily. “Enough. It’s just a stupid interview.”

Felix’s protests – _you have no idea what it’s like to lie your way through an interview like that_ – are drowned out by Dimitri’s profuse apologies. In a swift, sudden movement, Glenn slides out of the booth, glaring at each of them in turn until they fall silent. Sylvain looks down, feeling shamefully complicit in the petty argument for bringing up the video in the first place. “You know what? I’m going back to the village. I don’t want to see _either_ of you until you sort–” Glenn waves his hand in the vague direction of the table, “–this bullshit out.”

Sylvain watches him weave through tables and chairs to make his way to the exit, the bright bell of the door chime ringing to announce his departure. 

The table is _very_ quiet after that. 

—

“I don’t know what to do,” Dimitri confesses. 

Felix had followed suit shortly after Glenn stormed out, leaving Sylvain with the bill and a confused, upset Dimitri. So, he’d done what _his_ friends always did when he felt down – he’d dragged Dimitri towards the nearest bar to drown his sorrows.

They’re at a sake cellar down the street, standing at a thin wooden bar that’s wrapped around the perimeter of the brightly-lit room lined with hundreds of different bottles. The big windows are thrown open to illuminate a glow over the lantern-lined backstreets of Ginza, bringing the wet summer heat in to make his t-shirt stick against the small of his back. 

“I thought that maybe things would be okay– I mean, we’re all here, at the Olympics, after all.” Dimitri sighs, shaking his head. He’s barely touched his set of tasting cups. “It’s just– it’s been two years since Glenn’s accident, and I’ve done everything I can–”

“Dimitri,” Sylvain interrupts the inevitable downwards spiral, tapping his finger to his lips as he thinks. The unfiltered wine tastes cool and sweet on his tongue as he finishes off the strawberry nigori. “Have you tried telling him how you feel?”

Dimitri frowns. “I’ve tried to talk to Felix a number of times–”

“Not Felix.” Dimitri looks puzzled now. _“Glenn,”_ Sylvain clarifies.

It’s an obvious _no,_ evident in howDimitri gets quiet, pinching one of his tiny ceramic tasting cups between two fingers as he fidgets. “I–” he starts, then pauses. “I don’t know what you mean.”

Sylvain laughs, because _really –_ Dimitri can’t be serious. It’s obvious to anyone – anyone who isn’t Felix – that there’s more to Glenn and Dimitri than a simple coach and athlete relationship, more than _just friends._ Sylvain thinks of all the times he’s seen Glenn cozy up to Dimitri, any instance of Dimitri’s arm looped casually around Glenn’s waist, his chin resting atop his head. 

“Dimitri. I’ve _seen_ the way you look at him.” _And the way he looks at you._ It hangs unsaid in the air between them. Dimitri falls quiet, but Sylvain doesn’t push him for an answer. He’s somewhere between his fourth and fifth tasting cup when Dimitri finally turns to look at him.

“Did Glenn tell you about the accident?”

Sylvain nods.

“Did he mention that _I_ was the one who threw the ball?”

“No. No, he didn’t.” _But Felix did._

Dimitri exhales. He turns to look out at the sidewalk, not meeting Sylvain’s eyes when he says, “I cannot understand why, but Glenn and Felix both refuse to acknowledge it’s my fault he isn’t here in Tokyo competing as an athlete.”

His profile is cutting, silhouetted against the rosy glow of the street lanterns outside. For the first time, Sylvain notices a thin, jagged scar running from Dimitri’s temple through his eyebrow. “Have you considered – and hear me out on this – that they might be right?” 

Dimitri’s face scrunches up in distaste, but he doesn’t interrupt, which Sylvain takes as a sign to continue. “From my point of view, it sounds like a… a fluke. A freak accident.” Dimitri grunts noncommittally. “I wasn’t there, but I really doubt you knew that would happen when you took the shot.”

“No. No, I suppose not.”

Sylvain thinks of the way Dimitri had looked at Glenn – how it’d looked like trust, adoration, _love._ He thinks of what his own face had looked like, watching Felix tease him on camera. How they hadn’t really been too different.

“I think you should tell him how you feel,” he offers, swallowing his discomfort down.

Dimitri sighs. “I just… I hope my feelings don’t get in the way of our friendship.”

Sylvain still can’t really believe he’s referring to what they have as just _friendship._ “Well,” he says slowly, “how has living in the past worked out for you so far?” 

Dimitri casts him a curious look, a small smile playing on his face. “Not well.”

“It rarely does, I think.”

There’s something important here, Sylvain senses, something heavy in the weight of his words, of Dimitri’s burden. A feeling of resignation – or realization, maybe – sinks and settles into his chest, burning too hot to be comfortable. He thinks of Felix, kaleidoscoped in rumpled bed sheets, kissing him slow with flushed cheeks. The way he leans into him like he’s touch-starved. How he laughs at his jokes and uses every excuse to spend the night, curled into Sylvain’s side.

Dimitri seems to sense it, too. He’s quiet when he finally asks:

“And what will _you_ do?”

Sylvain smiles. It slides into place easily, the familiar fakeness of _everything’s fine_ coming easy. “Me? What do you mean? This is about you and Glenn.”

“I’m not completely oblivious. I watched that interview.” Dimitri’s voice falls a few notches, a poorly-kept secret. “I’ve seen the way Felix looks at _you.”_

It should feel cutting, having this thrown back at him, but Sylvain just sighs. He thinks of Felix, and his mouth curls into a smile, one he’s unable to stop from spreading across his face, thoroughly embarrassing. His voice comes out muffled, hiding half his face in his hands when he asks, “It’s not exactly subtle, is it?”

“Not exactly,” Dimitri rumbles, kind laughter lapping at the edges of his words. 

“Yeah. Thought as much.”

There’s a lull in the conversation, a breath of quiet air. Sylvain finishes off his sake with a final swig. 

“Sylvain?”

He tips his head to the side, swirling his glass in circular motions. The haze of alcohol blurs Dimitri in his periphery, blonde and blue. “Yeah?”

“Can I give you some advice? It’s something I heard recently from a new friend.” Dimitri’s smile is knowing, teasing, borderline-insufferable. Sylvain contemplates pushing him off his barstool, but decides against it. He waves his hand, fighting off his grin. 

“Alright, alright, get on with it.”

Dimitri’s voice is a soothing balm – there’s none of the earnest teasing there now, just gentle honesty. “Tell him how you feel.”

_It takes all that I got  
Not to fuck this up  
So won’t you let me know  
If I’m not alone  
Leaning on you  
_ —

Sylvain _tries_ to tell Felix how he feels. He really does. 

The thing is, Felix beats him to it.

_[Felix]: answer your door  
[Felix]: hello?_

_[Me]: what’s up?  
[Me]: i’m on the roof_

Sylvain had woken up early to an empty bed and too much restless energy, so he’d spent the day exploring. Tokyo, he learned, is different in the daytime: brighter, industrious, filled with the sounds of trains coming and going, thousands of bodies set to fast forward as he walked by in slow motion. He got lost in the dim backstreet aroma of summer melon and barely-ripe persimmon, following signs back towards Tokyo Station as the city melted in the apocalypse heat of summer. There’s a certain romance to walking a city solo, just another blurred face in a crowd of lit-neon, and Sylvain absorbed the debt and glamour and smell of sweet buns until it became simply too hot to bear the muggy sun burning the back of his neck, sweat pooling in his collarbone.

It’s finally cooled off under the cover of night, and one cold shower and heat-haze nap later, he’s enjoying his dinner on the roof, electric blue Tokyo shining across the harbor. It’s here that Felix finds him, dropping unceremoniously onto the sofa cushion next to his.

“I’m sorry.”

Sylvain frowns, setting his box of cafeteria takeout aside. “For what?” He’s been trying to figure out what to say all day – _I think I like you more than I probably should and I’m absolutely terrified that I’ll fuck this up_ – and Felix shows up _apologizing,_ of all things.

Felix twists his fingers in his lap. Sylvain can feel his anxious energy from all the way across the sofa. He sits up to lean in closer, and immediately feels a little better when Felix meets him halfway, calloused fingers skittering patterns across his open palm. “For leaving last night.”

He looks down at their hands, almost intertwined but not quite. Last night feels like something out of a dream, fuzzy around the edges. “Oh.”

“It was supposed to be _your_ dinner, and I–”

“Felix,” Sylvain interrupts him. “You don’t need to apologize for that.”

Felix frowns. He looks beautiful, the string-light glow catching in his eyelashes. It reminds Sylvain of their first night up here together, how badly he’d wanted to kiss him. How he wants to kiss Felix just as much now. 

“Still,” Felix protests.

There’s no reason to keep up their facade in this particular moment; there’s nobody around, no hidden cameras, no chance of paparazzi. But when Sylvain fumbles his fingers through the gaps in Felix’s, it feels inexplicably right. Felix doesn’t pull away – if anything he leans into Sylvain’s shoulder, melting at the edges.

“Have you talked to Glenn?” Sylvain asks. He measures each moment with steady, purposeful breaths. The air between them feels fragile, like one wrong move and everything will crumble apart.

When Felix starts to talk, he’s looking out at the water. His thumb keeps running over Sylvain’s, jittering across his palm. For some reason it soothes him, knowing that Felix’s heartbeat is going just as fast as his. “Not yet.”

Sylvain knows that this could very well blow up in his face. It feels like one of those trust exercises Claude made them all do as a team once, flinging himself backwards into oblivion, hoping that Felix will catch him. “Do you know what I thought when I first saw you all together?”

Felix turns back to him, equally inquisitive and wary, like he’s not sure he wants the answer.

“I thought, _it must be nice, to be so close to your brother.”_ Felix snorts, and Sylvain’s mouth curls into a smile. “Oh, and that guy has an _incredible_ ass–”

“Oh my _god,_ you’re insatiable,” Felix interrupts with an eyeroll. There’s a faint glimmer of a smile on his face, though, which means Sylvain hasn’t _totally_ fucked this up.

“You know, Dimitri does care about him.” Sylvain nudges Felix gently. “You _do_ know that, don’t you?”

A twist of emotions flare across Felix’s face. His voice loses its edge. “Yeah. Yeah, I do.”

Sylvain waits.

“I’m going to talk to him too.” The words feel drawn out of Felix reluctantly, like pulling teeth.

“Yeah?” 

“Yeah. I talked with Ingrid about it.” Felix scrubs his free hand across his face. “I think I owe him an apology.”

Felix, Sylvain has learned, wears his heart on his sleeve – at least, he does for most things. His brows knit together when he’s stressed. The thrum of his fingers tapping and the nervous tick of his knee bouncing speaks of impatience (and irritability). His good moods are marked by ruby-red blushes and shy, half-hidden smiles. 

Right now, his face is twisted into a sort of grimace that tells Sylvain this is new, unfamiliar territory for him, too. He waits. For once, he doesn’t really have anything to say.

“You weren’t there, but it was bad.” Felix frowns. “Really bad.”

Sylvain knows he’s talking about Glenn’s accident. The aftermath – of watching his own brother wither away, of watching his own best friend destroy himself with guilt. “I believe it.” He squeezes Felix’s palm, hoping to convey reassurance. “But I’ve seen the way he looks at your brother.” _I’ve seen the way_ I _look at you._ “Dimitri does care for him, even if you can’t see it.” _Even if you_ won’t _see it._

Felix tips his head to look at him, gaze curious. A stray piece of hair falls into his eyes, and Sylvain leans across the space between their bodies to tuck it back behind his ear, a smile curling across his face as it immediately springs back.

“What? Don’t look at me like that.”

Sylvain can’t stop grinning. “Look at you like what?” 

Now Felix is smiling. “You look... stupid.”

“Yeah,” Sylvain agrees. “Okay.”

Felix is looking at him, just like he’s looked at him a hundred other times – across an arena of lights and cameras and fans; in the space between a park bench, or a backseat; from the pillow opposite his in bed – like he knows what Sylvain’s thinking without even having to try. 

_I like you,_ he wants to say. The words spring to mind but get stuck somewhere between his lungs and his throat, though, a confession not quite ready to be made. Sylvain looks at him, illuminated in warmth, that one stubborn strand of hair flopped over his eyes, their palms sweating against each other. 

“What?” Sylvain prompts, nudging him again.

The magic dissipates as soon as Felix turns away, blushing. “Nothing.”

Sylvain looks back out towards the water, hiding his smile. “Okay.”

—

He almost says it later that night – _I like you_ – when he’s got Felix spilled across his lap, liquid around the edges, eyes glassy and fucked-out. It’s too bad he can barely think straight, with the noises Felix is making beneath him, rolling his hips up, demanding and shameless.

“Syl _vain,_ harder, _oh–”_

Sylvain doesn’t give it to him harder. If anything he slows down, tries to put into touch the words that won’t come out – _I care about you –_ with clever hands and the drag of his lips across Felix’s jaw. His own post-orgasm haze has him clinging to his last shreds of sense as his brain nearly bubbles over with soft affection, with _sweethearts_ and _darlings_ and words that start with the letter _L._

And, well, Sylvain’s had his fair share of hookups before. Most don’t last longer than a night, but there’s the rare few that drag on into a week or three. Regardless, Sylvain’s never felt compelled to make them last, letting them live as fleeting, one-off nights of pleasure.

He’s _certainly_ never wanted to learn someone else’s body – what makes them tick, how to wring pleasure out based on knowledge and past experience – like he finds himself learning Felix’s. It’s more intimate than he bargained for, taking note of the dark moles that dot the backs of Felix’s thighs, noticing how he twitches particularly hard when Sylvain digs his thumb into the notch of his hip. But he finds himself entranced, unable to keep himself from cataloguing the flexible bend of his body, the way he moves and writhes beneath him.

“You’re thinking too hard,” Felix mumbles, slurred with exhaustion. Sylvain’s just crawled back up from between his thighs, mouth slick with spit and Felix’s spend. It’s late, and he’s exhausted, but the words hang on the tip of his tongue, begging to be set free. _I like you._

“Hm?” Sylvain hums. Felix has enough energy to turn his head and frown at him. A trickle of sweat rolls down the side of his face and Sylvain kisses it off. “Just thinking about you, baby.” 

It’s a line, and not a particularly good one, if Felix’s scowl is anything to go by. Something in his gaze softens, though, and then he’s pushing Sylvain against the bed, climbing into his lap. Sylvain’s gone soft, and Felix hardly looks like he’s up for the task of another round, but he leans in, back arching gracefully, to press a line of kisses down Sylvain’s neck. Sylvain’s almost too tired to reciprocate, but he brings his hands up to settle around Felix’s slim hips anyway. 

“What are you doing?” Sylvain murmurs when Felix’s hands wander towards his cock, brushing across his bare hip.

Felix looks up at him through thick lashes, his mouth twisting into a frown. He leans in for another kiss to the center of his chest, mouthing against the constellation of freckles there.

“Taking care of you.”

Sylvain lets him.

—

He almost says it after Felix wins gold in the men’s all-around finals.

They all rush to him in a blur once the stadium has mostly cleared out. Felix looks just as shell-shocked and happy as Sylvain had felt walking out with his own medal, hugging Glenn for a long minute, even letting Dimitri clap him on the back before turning to Sylvain.

“Felix, congrat–”

And then Felix is kissing him to a choir of wolf-whistles and camera flashes. He tastes like sweat, like summer, and Sylvain kisses him back for all he’s worth. It’s just as exhilarating as the first time, because when Sylvain pulls away, Felix is grinningat him, like, honest-to-god _grinning._ Sylvain’s chest blooms with affection and threatens to burst as he slides his hand up the curve of Felix’s jaw and pulls him in for another, then another. He barely even registers the cheers coalescing around them, or the sound of Glenn saying _get a room,_ or the shifting wave of bodies around them in the crowd.

When they finally pull away, breathless and smiling like absolute idiots, Sylvain’s heart is pounding, his blood roaring with _Felix, Felix, Felix._ The gold medal brushes against his chest from where it hangs around Felix’s neck. He wants so badly to tell him, to lay all his emotions out on the table, to wrap Felix up not just in more kisses but in the promise of a _maybe_ together.

“Felix, I–”

“There’s an interview,” Felix cuts him off, still looking elated. “Come with?”

It’s a single TV slot that’s over in a little under half an hour. Sylvain watches from the cramped half-circle of folding chairs behind the camera, pointedly ignoring the way the director keeps shooting glances at him as if he’ll change his mind. They’d initially asked him to join Felix, hoping to get the happy couple together for more views, but Sylvain had refused, sending Felix off to hair and makeup with a brief forehead kiss. “Go, get your fifteen minutes. I’ll cheer you on from here.”

Felix isn’t a natural interviewer. Sylvain knows this firsthand, and he’d be lying if he said he wasn’t just a little bit nervous for him – the first few minutes are rocky, and he gives short, terse answers to each question. But then the reporter switches tactics, and Felix finally hits his stride. 

He talks about discipline, its inherent unpredictability. About taking it day-by-day, practice-by-practice, but staying focused on your goals. About having a routine, and sticking to it, regardless of all the bullshit happening in your life (Sylvain thinks they’ll probably have to censor that one out). About being hungry, and feeding that hunger with competition, and flourishing under pressure. 

When the reporter asks _what’s the first thing you did after getting your medal?_ Felix stifles a smile. Sylvain can’t help but grin, because, well – he remembers Felix waving from the podium. Remembers the way his smile lit up when he finally spotted Sylvain and Glenn in the crowd. Remembers their kiss, surely posted all over Twitter by now. Remembers the way Felix’s smile felt pressed up against his own, jubilant in his victory.

—

He wants to say it – _I don’t want whatever this is to end –_ later that night, curled up in bed.

Felix is tracing abstract patterns through his freckles, his head pillowed on his chest. They’re both stripped naked in the heat, laying on top of Sylvain’s sweat-soaked sheets, legs tangled together after making out for so long in the shower that Felix actually got a little dizzy from lack of breath. Sylvain keeps drawing circles in the small of his back, enjoying the way Felix’s body fits into the curve of his arm, pressed up against his side, nestled there perfectly.

“What are you thinking about right now?” Sylvain asks, murmured against his forehead.

Felix snorts, a soft gust of breath fanning out over his skin. “Today. Everything. I don’t even know.” He sounds genuinely happy, and it makes Sylvain melt into impossible fondness. “What are _you_ thinking about?”

It wouldn’t be a lie to say _you._ “I don’t want to go home,” he side steps carefully. Felix tilts his head up to look at him, his gaze piercing in the dim light, and Sylvain backpedals, feeling too vulnerable in his overt honesty. “The past few weeks have just been… really nice, is all. They flew by.”

_Understatement of the century, Gautier._

It’s a weak diversion, and the look on Felix’s face says that he can absolutely tell. “Yeah. It’s been fun,” Felix mumbles, embarrassed and flushed pink. 

And yeah, maybe he’s talking about the experience of the Olympics in general, but it’s so easy to pretend that Felix is talking about _this_ specifically – whatever it is they’re doing. There’s no need for them to even be still spending time together, but here they are, in the privacy of Sylvain’s room, the night before the closing ceremony.

“Yeah?” Sylvain asks. It comes out breathy, his heart caught up somewhere between his throat and his ribs. 

“Yeah.” Felix fits his nose into the notch of Sylvain’s neck. “We’re staying a few days. Dimitri and Glenn found some resort on a lake and booked two rooms,” he mumbles between kisses, fingers wandering up and down the curve of Sylvain’s hip, slipping in and out of the band of his boxers. 

“Oh.” Sylvain’s heart sinks. He sounds horribly disappointed, despite his best efforts not to be. “Sounds fun.”

Felix pulls his hand out from where it’s tracing over the outline of his cock through the fabric to flick him on the nose. “That was an invitation, idiot.”

Warmth spreads through his chest, a slow fire burning him from the inside out. He doesn’t realize he’s grinning until Felix taps his cheek, nudging his jaw towards him. “So? Will you come?” Felix almost looks nervous, like he’s starting to think he shouldn’t have said anything at all, but then Sylvain’s pulling him down into a kiss. He tries to pour the swell of affection he feels into it, the warmth and the want, tracing his fingertips down Felix’s jawline, breathing in the smell of his shampoo.

“Yeah. Yeah, if you’ll have me.”


	7. Chapter 7

_And isn’t it just so pretty to think  
All along there was some  
Invisible string  
Tying you to me?  
_ —

The closing ceremony goes by in a blur of fireworks and champagne sparkles. 

It’s another one of those out-of-body experiences where time passes in weird patterns – slow, and then all too fast – and his heartbeat thunders in his chest, exhilarated and overwhelmed as he tries to remember every detail, thinking _this is important_ about every bit of minutia, knowing full-well it’ll all be a blur later.

But then he catches Felix’s hand in the crowd and pulls him into a magnetic kiss, and his world tips back on its proper axis again, grounded in the pull of Felix’s body against his. Their medals – Sylvain’s silver, and Felix’s silver and gold – clatter against each other under the firework blue-purple-pink sky. Felix looks just as kissable as he did out in the park almost a month ago.

Sylvain doesn’t hesitate this time.

That night, he cancels his flight home and rebooks another for a week out. Felix reads off his confirmation code to him from his phone, double-checking that they match up. He feels a little reckless and a lot lucky when the seat next to Felix’s is miraculously empty and he finally presses the _confirm flight_ button. 

Claude kisses each of his cheeks as he heads out to pick Marianne up from her hotel. The square velvet box rests in his pocket, and he winks getting into the back of the cab. “I’ll be engaged the next time you see me,” he jokes. Sylvain can’t wipe the stupid grin off his face. 

They all manage to pile into a tiny cab together the next day, the trunk stuffed to the brim with their luggage. The drive up to Lake Ashi cuts along the ocean, saltwater blue reflecting cloudless skies as they wind their way up through the mountains. Sylvain’s front legs are jammed up against the dash in the passenger seat. He can see the reflection of Felix in the side mirror, leaning his forehead up against the window, nodding his head along to whatever’s playing through his bulky headphones. Glenn falls asleep within five minutes of heading out, leaning against Dimitri’s shoulder.

The resort is stunning. It looks like something straight out of a movie set: nestled above cerulean water, surrounded on three sides by brilliantly lush forest and terraced gardens, Mt. Fuji a faint impression in the distance, covered in purple heather and melted snow streaks. Felix’s eyes flash sundrenched gold as they climb out of the cab, distracting Sylvain from the view as he takes Felix’s duffel from the curb and slings it over his shoulder, leaning in for a brief kiss through a smile as he heads to the reception desk to check them in.

—

Felix only lasts about half a day before getting restless. 

They wake up tangled in crisp cream linen, the sunrise silhouetting where Felix is turned on his side, hair spilling in dark waves across the pillow. Sylvain watches his lashes flutter as he shifts closer, greedy for body heat as he stretches out across the bed with a yawn.

“Morning,” Sylvain mumbles into the slope of Felix’s neck. They’d spent most of last night floating in the steam of the hot spring, curled in on one another until the stars dotted the dark sky in freckled constellations. He drowsily hopes that they’ll sleep in and spend the day wrapped in fluffy robes, sitting by the infinity pool overlooking the lake, sipping drinks and picking at expensive sushi. 

Felix seems to have other plans, though. He rolls over and away from him, sliding out of bed with a yawn. Bright light filters through the room as he pushes back the drapes, revealing their little walk-out balcony, warm in the early morning sun, and the shimmering lake beyond. 

“I found a hike nearby,” Felix says, stretching his arms up before bending neatly in half, palms planted flat on the ground. 

Sylvain, settling back into the small mountain of pillows with his arms folded behind his head, thoroughly enjoying the view, says, “A hike?” 

“Yeah.” Felix unfolds himself and arcs one graceful arm over to the side. He looks sleep-sweet like this, pale skin and dark moles on display in just his briefs, his hair still vaguely ruffled from where Sylvain nuzzled into it earlier that morning. “It takes us halfway around the lake.” 

Sylvain hums, moving a hand beneath the sheets to palm at his half-hard cock, which twitches in interest when Felix turns to the side and sinks into the splits with absolutely no resistance. “It’s only twenty kilometers.” 

_“Only_ twenty kilometers,” Sylvain snorts, shaking his head. “Remember how you like, oh,I don’t know, won gold at the _Olympics_ two days ago?” Their combined medals hang off the bathroom doorknob, ribbons twined together.

Felix smirks as he stands and leans his forearms across the bed. His eyes are fever-hot, focused entirely on where Sylvain’s lazily stroking himself beneath the duvet. “Yeah, I do.”

“When’s the last time you relaxed?” Sylvain teases as he reaches for Felix’s hands.

“Yesterday,” Felix shoots back, grinning, but he’s already climbing into his lap, biting a kiss into the top of his shoulder. Sylvain settles his hands around his waist, stroking up the arched curve of his back as Felix melts into him. He laughs, a little breathless and _very_ turned on. 

“Indulge me a bit longer?” 

—

Sylvain’s plan to sleep in backfires, because Felix somehow gets more energized than ever, even after being spread out on his fingers and fucked across the bed. They shower together after, and despite Sylvain’s best attempts to coax him into staying under the hot water spray for five more minutes, soon Felix is dragging him towards the trailhead, his body buzzing with restless energy. He’s wearing those tiny running shorts again, and they keep distracting Sylvain from the dirt path that stretches before them in a steady, gradual climb.

The trail takes them around the western edge of the lake, through dense, lush rainforest and against rocky shores where the water laps at the edges of their running shoes. It even dips briefly up to where a lone cloud hangs over a cluster of hills, covering everything in a low, quiet fog before the sun burns it off with afternoon heat. Felix laughs when Sylvain plugs his nose and scrunches his face up to make his ears pop.

For how beautiful the day is, they don’t pass many tourists or other hikers along their way to the summit. The heat isn’t nearly as stifling as it was in Tokyo, and when they finally reach the summit, the air is crisp and clear, cerulean sky and water as far as the eye can see. Sylvain whistles as he drops onto the lone wooden bench at the lookout point, only a little breathless from the last switchback they climbed. 

“Damn.” 

Sylvain’s talking about the view, but there’s also Felix, looking out at it, sweat gathered at his neck under the summer sun. He smiles lazily, patting the seat next to where he’s sprawled out. “Almost makes me wish I didn’t rebook my flight,” he half-jokes, gesturing to Mt. Fuji silhouetting where various ships dot the lake below them. 

Felix slides onto the bench, looking over at him with a curious expression. “Really?”

“I mean, sure.” Sylvain shrugs. “I don’t know.”

“You could always stay longer. Or travel somewhere else.” Felix passes him a water bottle from his drawstring backpack.

“Yeah,” Sylvain agrees. It should sound more appealing than it does, but the thought of doing something like that alone feels, for whatever reason, deeply unsatisfying. He takes a swig of water, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand. “What are you going to do?”

“When I get home?” 

Sylvain nods. Felix looks out at the view, his hair catching ribbons of sunlight as he peels open a package of wasabi peas. “I don’t really know. I’ve spent the last four years training for this, and now I have it, you know?”

Sylvain smiles, because yeah, he knows all too well. There’s been exuberant joy, of course, ever since winning his medal, and the warm pride that came with knowing he actually earned it, but there’s also been the vague waves of nausea that set in, that untethered _well, what now?_ that’s been plaguing him. 

Felix’s voice is quiet and almost hesitant. “I’m not sure if I know how to take a break anymore.” The way he says it almost sounds like a confession, vulnerable and honest. Sylvain rubs a hand across his shoulder, relieved when Felix leans into it, tipping his head against him despite the sweat and heat. 

Somewhere in the forest, a songbird trills out a complicated melody. A breeze ruffles the trees, cooling the sweat on Sylvain’s brow. He reaches for Felix’s hand resting on the bench between them, brushing his fingertips across his palm before weaving his fingers through the gaps.

“What about… this?” Felix sounds a little nervous, unsure where he’s usually confident. Sylvain’s heart thuds loudly in his chest. He hopes Felix can’t hear it.

“What about what?”

Felix holds up their entwined hands; neither of them let go. “This.”

 _Oh,_ Sylvain thinks. _This._

This: almost a whole month wrapped up in one another, first as casual fuckbuddies featuring the most mindblowingly athletic sex of Sylvain’s life, but now something else entirely, unfamiliar and terrifying and exhilarating. This: good morning kisses and casual, intimate affection; late nights spent talking about everything and nothing, fingertips learning dusted freckles and the shape of conviction. This: Felix’s hard-earned trust, the sway of his body leaning into Sylvain’s own, drunk in the back of cabs and karaoke bar booths, fragile in his cracked-open vulnerability.

And perhaps most telling, not wanting to let _this_ go when they fly back to Paris in three days and resume their real lives.

“Well,” Sylvian says, letting the view distract him, because the words already feel stuck in his throat and looking at Felix would only make it harder, “you got your sponsorship, yeah?” Dorothea had called them both after Felix’s TV interview, reading off the subject lines of dozens of interested emails. 

“Sylvain.” Felix’s hand squeezes tightly around his own. “That’s not what I’m asking.”

“Yeah,” Sylvain breathes out shakily. “Yeah, guess not.”

“Do you still want to…” Felix pauses, his face scrunching up in concentration, like he’s trying to remember something. _“Go our separate ways?”_

Three weeks ago, he would’ve probably said yes. He’s the one who suggested it in the first place, after all, a selfish excuse to get closer to Felix under the guise of good press. Three weeks ago, he wouldn’t have anticipated those words stinging as much as they do now, twisting his heart into a stinging, burning knot in his throat. When he turns to look at Felix, he’s gut-punched by the uncertain hint of hope he sees there.

“No,” he admits. It’s scarier than jumping off of any diving block, meeting Felix’s eyes, flashing golden-amber in the sunlight’s glare. “No, I don’t.”

Felix sighs out a held breath, relief bleeding out of him like a fresh wound. “Me neither.”

The air feels clearer; sweet, even. With the weight of his confession lifted, Sylvain laughs, and he breathes in Felix, and he kisses him with everything he’s got. He roams the curve of Felix’s lips, his tongue tracing raw rose as Felix’s cheeks turn from pink to poppy against his palms. His own body feels bright, alive, _burning,_ adrenaline crackling like lightning up his spine, heartbeat like thunder in his chest.

“What now?” Felix is first to break the silence, soft and wondering. 

“I don’t know,” Sylvain shrugs, too exhilarated to really care. _He likes you back,_ his brain sings on repeat. “I don’t do the… dating thing too often.”

Felix snorts. “You mean _real_ dating?”

Sylvain nods and nudges their foreheads together, unwilling to let him go very far. He thinks of Claude’s advice. _It doesn’t always need to be a big complicated thing. Sometimes it just works._

“Does anything have to change?” he wonders, fingers finding felicity in brushing Felix’s bangs away from his forehead, smudging a kiss to the peach of his cheek.

Felix’s mouth twists into a small, skeptical frown. “I guess not.” 

“Okay.” Giddy energy thrums beneath his palms wherever he touches Felix, tracing the line of his jaw, the curve of his neck, skittering down his back and up his sides. He feels like he could hike around the whole damn lake if Felix asked him to. Instead he leans in for another flurry of kisses, each one more breathless than the last.

“You’re doing it again.” Felix finally pulls back, smirking. The effect is only partially ruined by the way his pupils are blown black, how his lips shine in the sun, spit-slick and kiss-bitten.

Sylvain tips his head to the side, questioning. “Doing what?”

Felix rolls his eyes, but one of his fingers comes up to outline the shape of Sylvain’s smile, pausing in the dip of his single dimple. “That… _look.”_

He laughs, surprised. “The stupid look?”

“Yeah.” Felix looks like he’s struggling not to smile like an idiot too. “That.”

“You like it,” he teases, grinning wider than ever when Felix swings a leg over to slide into his lap. He’s backlit like this, sweat-damp hair a glowing halo around the shadow of his face, the sun hot where Sylvain brings his hands up to settle around his waist.

“Yeah,” Felix repeats, his voice low and throaty, a smile unfurling in a slow ribbon across his face. “Yeah, I do.”

—

They end up taking the ferry back across the lake, partly because the only snack Felix brought were wasabi peas and Sylvain is starving, but mostly because he wants to spend the rest of the evening spoiling his _boyfriend_ (his heart flutters in nervous, excited beats whenever he thinks of Felix that way) instead of climbing back down the mountain. He’s too distracted by the sight of their hands twined together against the railing to pay much attention to the ride or the guide narrating their journey over the intercom speaker, pointing out each shrine and ship they pass.

Golden hour covers the sky in cotton-candy clouds, lilac and pearlescent pink reflecting off the lake to play scattered lightwaves across Felix’s face. Even when they finally dock, Sylvain can’t seem to look away.

It’s almost dark when they finally make their way from the lobby to the casual, buffet-style cafeteria that overlooks the infinity pool. Felix heads straight to the self-serve drink bar while Sylvain stops by each station, piling an obscene amount of food for the two of them into the provided takeout containers. He specifically makes sure to add as much spicy chicken katsu as the largest box will hold. 

“Felix? You ready?”

Felix snaps his attention away from the floor-to-ceiling window he’d been staring out. There’s a glint of disbelief in his face, eyes wide, mouth quirked into a frown. “What?”

Sylvain hefts the three boxes of takeout, neatly stacked in his hands. “Dinner’s ready.”

Felix turns briefly back towards the window.

It’s dark, but the pool outside is illuminated with glowing lanterns that cast warm light across the water’s surface. It’s empty, save for Glenn and Dimitri – Dimitri’s laughing, the sound muted through the glass, but the expression on his face is pure joy as Glenn splashes at him playfully. Glenn’s smiling, too, wider than Sylvain’s ever seen him, dissolving into peals of laughter when Dimitri finally catches him and pulls him into his lap with comfortable ease. He reaches up to thumb something away from Dimitri’s cheek, and Dimitri captures Glenn’s wrist in his hand, pressing a kiss to the center of his palm, the very picture of tender intimacy. 

Meanwhile, Felix looks like his entire world has just been turned upside down.

“Felix?” Sylvain prompts gently, threading his free hand around Felix’s waist, nudging him into his side. Felix looks up, and Sylvain’s heart breaks a little at the unsure upset twisting on his face.

“C’mon,” he murmurs into the side of Felix’s hair, pressing a soft kiss there. “Let’s go eat.”

—

“Did you ever talk to Dimitri?” Sylvain finally asks. The lights are off, the drapes shuttered, but he can feel the uneven rise and fall of Felix’s chest against his own signalling that he’s not asleep yet. They’d eaten dinner in their room in near-silence, Felix responding to each of Sylvain’s questions with monosyllabic answers, clearly distracted in his own thoughts. 

Sylvain didn’t press him. He’d gently pulled the paper chopstick sleeve he’d been twisting knots into from Felix’s fingers and brought him to the shower, washing away the sweat and dirt from their earlier hike with careful hands. 

It’s a little ironic, Sylvain thinks, that he’s able to help Felix not only with the distraction of touch, but by taking care of him like this, too. It’s unfamiliar, tugging one of his own oversized shirts from last year’s world championship over Felix’s head, detangling wet hair with careful, soothing fingers as they lay in bed. It’s not uncomfortable, though, especially with how Felix leans into him, lets his eyes flutter shut on a sigh, _trusts_ him. 

“Kind of,” comes Felix’s reply. Sylvain can feel the shape of his mouth twist into a frown against where it’s buried in his neck.

“And?” he prompts, stroking circles into the small of his back.

Felix exhales, long and slow. “I don’t know. A single conversation isn’t going to fix everything.”

“No,” he agrees, “it’s not.” 

“I–” and Felix’s voice cracks a little, frustration bubbling up, “I know the accident wasn’t his fault, I _know_ that, it’s just…”

“...Hard?” Sylvain finishes for him. Felix nods. “Yeah. I know.”

“I just don’t remember the last time I saw him so... happy.” Sylvain knows he’s talking about Glenn now, the way his face had lit up in bright, bubbly laughter in the pool. 

“Isn’t that a good thing?” he asks, pressing a kiss into the side of Felix’s head.

Felix sighs. “Yeah. Yeah, it is.”

Sylvain holds him close. The silence they share is comfortable; there’s a different weight to it now. 

“You never talk about your brother,” Felix says softly, twisting his face to blink up at him. Sylvain can barely make out the shadowed slope of his nose, the furrowed curve of his brows, the gentle pout of his lips from across the pillow they share.

“There isn’t much to say,” he starts to deflect, but then Felix just looks at him, all open vulnerability, and something inside him shifts, turning over, baring its belly. 

Sylvain breathes in and out. “What do you want to know?”

Felix asks about his family. About who they are. What they’re like. If he’ll ever meet them. Getting started is the hardest part – _where to even start?_ – and Sylvain fumbles to find the right words to explain it all: their obsession with appearances, with fitting their sons into perfectly shaped boxes. How Miklan hadn’t performed well enough, how they couldn’t find a place for him in that perfect family paradigm, how the future of the company, of the family name, was put on Sylvain’s shoulders. How he’d never wanted any of it. How he’d acted out, doing his best to besmirch the name _Gautier._

At first, Felix almost looks like he regrets bringing it up. But he doesn’t say anything, not even when Sylvain pauses while he tries to figure out what to say. He just brushes Sylvain’s hair out of his eyes and listens.

It’s past midnight by the time Sylvain finally runs out of words. He feels raw, gutted open, exhausted.

“I’m sorry,” he starts, but then Felix leans up, hushing his apology with a kiss. 

“Don’t be. I asked.” It’s terribly honest, the way Felix says it, like he truly means it, like he’s not absolutely terrified of the skeleton-filled closet Sylvain just opened up and let spill out.

Sylvain pulls him closer, until all he’s breathing in is Felix, the smell of the citrus-sandalwood soap they’d washed with filling his lungs. He tries again. “Thank you.”

Felix hums, turning to kiss down the slope of his neck. “That’s better.”

_We’re watching the sunrise from the kitchen counter  
When you’re lying between my legs, it doesn’t matter  
You say you wanna go slower but I wanna go faster  
Faster and faster  
_ —

Contrary to popular opinion, Sylvain’s always loved airports. 

There’s something inherently romantic about the endless possibility of the flickering _departures_ board, of climbing on a plane to fly over infinite oceans and entire continents. He’s always liked the communal loneliness of thousands of people passing each other by, the rows of fast food chains the only constant in a temporal, forever in flux space.

Felix doesn’t seem to share the sentiment. 

He’s been in a bad mood ever since they’d left the hotel half an hour behind schedule. It only escalated when Glenn realized he’d forgotten one of his bags on the couch in the resort’s lobby and had to turn around halfway down the mountain to go get it. (It didn’t matter in the end, because their flight ended up delayed by two hours. Sylvain had only discovered this after they’d all rushed through security when his phone had lit up with a cheerful alert reminding him of the gate change.)

It also doesn’t help that it’s six in the morning and Felix is decidedly _not_ a morning person.

“Are you _sure_ this is the right gate?” Felix asks, squinting down blearily at the ticket on his phone.

Sylvain hums, curling an arm around his waist to press a kiss to his cheek. “Yes, I’m sure. The board will update in a minute, we’re just early now.” 

Felix mutters something half-coherent and profanity-laced about the airline they’re flying. Sylvain chuckles, soothing him with another kiss. “I think we passed a Starbucks a little ways back–”

“Thank _fuck.”_ Felix slings off his backpack, letting it _thump_ on the carpeted floor of the terminal in front of Sylvain’s feet to join Glenn and Dimitri’s carry-ons, neatly stacked on top of one another’s. Upon finding the right gate, they’d immediately taken off to search for breakfast and a new headphone-splitter, since Dimitri had accidentally left their last one on the flight here.

“Iced chai with almond milk, please!” Sylvain calls after him, grinning when Felix waves his hand in vague acknowledgement. 

The last few days definitely rank among Sylvain’s favorites of the entire trip. After the exhausting emotional rollercoaster of spilling his guts not once but twice, they’d spent the next twenty-four hours holed up in their room. Sylvain fucks him once, twice, three times in a row – against the wall, in the shower, on the bathroom counter. He puts his swimmer’s stamina to good use, and Felix twists himself into positions Sylvain’s never even dreamed of. 

Felix fucks him, too – it turns out gymnasts are scary-strong, and Sylvain doesn’t think he’s ever been more turned on in his life when Felix tosses him into bed like he weighs absolutely nothing. By the end of it they’re both exhausted, covered in cum, tangling their legs together in the sheets as they watch the sunset over the lake and share a bottle of water.

Felix’s restless energy dissipates a little after that. They book a couple’s massage and a private onsen for the day and get tipsy at the poolside bar at night. Sylvain doesn’t remember the last time he was in a pool lined with fruity, alcoholic drinks and not lane dividers. 

They don’t see much of Dimitri and Glenn, aside from the occasional _hello_ as they pass each other on the way to the buffet or pool. He mouths _congrats_ at Dimitri once when he spots them holding hands, who blushes pleased pink up to the tips of his ears. Felix is civil. Friendly, even. It’s more than Sylvain could’ve hoped for.

“Thanks.” Glenn kicks his and Dimitri’s bags across the floor to the set of seats across from Sylvain’s. 

Sylvain smiles. “No worries.” There’s something still intimidating about Felix’s older brother, especially now that they’re actually dating. “Where’s Dimitri?”

“Picking out a book.” Glenn shrugs, picking at his fingernails. He doesn’t seem inclined to continue the conversation, looking listlessly up at their gate’s TV screen. It still says _Los Angeles | Boarding at 07:35._

Sylvain continues anyway, because he’s never known when to stop talking when it counts. “I never said congrats, by the way.”

“For what?” Glenn’s expression shifts into polite confusion.

“You and Dimitri. Y’know. Getting together.” Sylvain cringes inwardly at himself. It sounded better in his head – maybe Glenn would smile, say something nice about how Felix seems happy with him, welcome him into the family for real. 

Glenn stares blankly back at him, and for a second Sylvain thinks he’s made a horrible mistake, but then the flat line of his mouth curves into a tiny smile. 

“Shouldn’t I be the one congratulating _you?”_ he asks pointedly.

Sylvain blushes crimson. Sylvain doesn’t _blush._ “Ah. Yeah. I, uh–”

“Sylvain?” 

He swallows, his stutters dying off. “Yeah?”

Glenn levels his gaze at him. 

“Don’t fuck this up,” he says, amusement blooming through the smile on his face.

Sylvain breathes out a relieved, near-hysterical laugh. “Yeah. Yeah, I’m not planning on it.”

They lapse into quiet silence. It’s more comfortable this time around. Glenn pulls out his phone and rummages through his carry-on for his earbuds. Sylvain drums his fingers on the top of his knees. The sounds of the airport around them are soothing, predictable: a deafening roar of a plane landing on the tarmac outside, the barcode beep of boarding passes being scanned, last call for seat upgrades from the next gate over.

Sylvain’s struck with a sudden bout of inspiration.

“Can you watch the bags for a second?”

Glenn nods mutely, watching with vague interest as Sylvain pulls the two boarding passes they’d printed while checking their copious bags out of the side pocket of his backpack. He double-checks to make sure Felix isn’t already on his way back and approaches the receptionist’s desk with the most charming smile he has, slipping the two tickets across the counter. “Hi. Would it be possible to upgrade to first class?”

—

“Sylvain?”

The movie credits are still rolling when Felix squeezes his hand. The armrest is pushed all the way up, allowing them to curl into each other beneath a shared blanket. Early-morning light streams in through the gaps between the sliding blinds and the port window, pale yellow prisms playing across the seat backs in front of them. It’s still early, only two hours into their flight, and they’ve already cruised their way through one of the feature films that came free with their seat upgrade, some cheesy action romcom that Sylvain’s pretty sure Felix only tolerated for the fighting scenes sprinkled throughout. 

“Yeah?”

Felix’s voice is quiet, muffled into the fabric of his sweatshirt. “Are you nervous?”

Sylvain hums, reaching towards the touch-screen to flip through the _up next_ section of movie thumbnails. “’Bout what?”

Felix lifts their hands up. “About _this.”_

Sylvain’s heart stops. He lifts his gaze to Felix’s. His eyes look golden in the beam of sunlight that sways across his face, steady as the rumbling hum of the airplane around them. He’s biting his lip, eyebrows drawn into each other. 

He could lie. He could make up a million different reasons why he’s not nervous, promise platitudes about why there’s no reason to be worried. He could distract Felix with a searing kiss, soothe the anxious knot of energy as he chews at the inside of his cheek with a clever tongue and careful hands.

He could lie, but he doesn’t want to. Not anymore.

“Yes,” Sylvain says slowly. Because the truth is, he _is_ terrified. Japan seems like a far-away dream already. Going back to Paris means going back to real life – a place where all of his past relationships have gone down in flames. And he can’t remember the last time he cared so much. Sylvain brings their entwined hands up to his mouth, where he presses a chaste kiss to the back of Felix’s hand. “I want to figure it out, though. With you.”

Felix’s brows soften. Sylvain strains to hear him over the thrum of the jet engine. “Okay.”

He grins, slow at first but then all at once. His face probably looks like _that stupid expression_ Felix is always teasing him about,but he can’t bring himself to care. Felix’s mouth pulls into a shy, barely-there smile before he leans up for a kiss. His lips are soft and just this side of chapped. He tastes like bitter coffee; like warm, content trust.

Like something Sylvain wants to hold on to and never let go. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for reading! I'm on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/cherryconke) ❤️


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